Hong Kong Adventures: Hong Kong Day 24 -- Night at the Horse Races

Could feel last night's workout more and more as the day went on. Today we went to a Hong Kong style cafe in Wan Chai for breakfast. It is part of the same restaurant chain as the one near our apartment that we have gone to for dinner a couple of times. I got noodles with beef satay that also came with scrambled eggs and a biscuit. During work today, I updated our spreadsheet to automatically calculate the costs for servers, and we also worked on our report. We were able to meet with our sponsor after lunch and go over the accounts that we made for the department to track costs.

For lunch, we walked down to the same area as yesterday, and got food from the restaurant next door. I had sliced pork with garlic. It came with rice, soup, and tea. It tasted really good, and the sauce that was on the pork was really good. A little bit spicy, with a good amount of garlic. We also stopped and picked up some fresh fruit juice on the way back to the office. I chose orange mango juice.

After work we headed back to our apartments and then Yan, Ciara and I went down to the Happy Valley racecourse, where the Hong Kong Jockey Club is located. They have horse races once a week through a large portion of the year. We took a tram from our apartments to the race track. It is pretty close to our apartments, but it isn’t that easy to walk to, so we decided to take the tram. It cost $10HK for us to get in, and we got there right around 7, when the races started. We watched one race from near the start gates, and then walked around a little bit.

For the second race, we went down to near the parade ring, where we saw the horses before they went out onto the track. Then we lined up near the fence by the finish line to watch the race. This race had a crash on the opposite side of the track, two horses ran into each other, and they went down, two jockeys fell off the horses. They have a TV screen in the middle, so everyone saw this crash on there. All but those two horses came around in the same group, and then one came up a little ways behind without a rider. The last horse came running up to the finish line without putting weight on one of it’s front legs. One person immediately rushed out to try to stop the horse and calm it down. A few other people went out there also, and were holding the horse, trying to calm it and keep it from moving around very much. They drove a horse ambulance out and after a few minutes they put the horse into it and drove into the paddock area. There was someone near me who said that he wasn’t sure how bad of an injury it was, but that it seemed to be pretty bad. He said that they would bring it in and do xrays to see where and how bad the break was to determine what they would need to do for the horse.

After this, we went inside to learn how to bet on a race. We each placed a bet and then went out to watch the race. We ended up betting on 3 races, and watched them. I bet $120HK total, and in the end, I won $135HK, so in $US, I came out +$2. It was a lot of fun to see the races, and it was a really neat environment. There were a lot of people there, the fence would fill up as it got close to race time, and then once it was over people would quickly go back in to place another bet, or cash in tickets. They had a lot of beer stands, and groups of people were walking around with pitchers of beer for their group to share. They also had some food stands with stuff that looked pretty good. We waited until after to eat. We stopped at the souvenir stand on the way out, and I bought a Happy Valley Racecourse magnet.

We took the tram back to our apartments and then went to get some food. Ciara and I stopped at the street food stall again to pick up some dinner. The whole day was really fun, it was neat to see the horse racing and it was a pretty nice night too.