Hong Kong and Macau

I have spent now a week in HK, and every one of the days has been long and hectic. A friend of mine from Finland has been travelling with me, which has made the beer input slightly higher than normal. Hong Kong has been a total surprise for me, as I was expecting only the tall buildings but not the nature and the mountains all around it. We went up the Victoria Peak by the Peak Tram and up to the Ngong Ping with the cable car. There were beautiful views over the town, the airport and especially over the mountains. In Ngong Ping we saw a modern Buddhist monastery, the world's biggest outside sitting bronze Buddha statue and a monument with the heart sutra written on wood pillars - all built in the past 20 years or so but in the familiar hundreds of years old Buddhist style.

I have been pleasantly surprised by the public transport system, especially after Manila where there was none. The subway, boats and buses are easily navigated and paid for with a handy Octopus card. The Octopus is a valid and easy form of payment also in some tourist attractions, fast food restaurants and shops. Very handy when paying for small amounts and not familiar with the coins! The only complaint I have is the shopping complexes that surround the subway exits and makes it impossible to just get to the street and where you wanted to go to! And the shopping in HK seems to be a lot of Gucci, Rolex and Cartier, so I have not ventured to any shops at all.

Hong Kong is very British in small ways, but actually not at all. The people are very business-like and majority remind me of the City people in London. A lot of foreigners are here obviously for business, and everyone speaks English. Or in the cases where the waitress has not spoken English, someone else has helped us immediately. So very friendly too! On Saturday we took ferry to Macau, which used to be under Portuguese rule for a long time. Nowadays it was a small city-country (or a Special Administrative Region of China, just like Hong Kong) that looks like a bastard child of Lisbon and Las Vegas. The Lisbon side of the town had a lot of historic churches and forts, but the skyscrapers where normal people lived were very run down. The food on the streets offered Portuguese options in addition to the noodle soups. The casinos were grand and tall and sparkly and flashy and kitch. We went inside a couple of them, and spent some spare money on number seven on the roulette (we're both born on 7th July) and lost it all of course. It all was a bit absurd, the casinos and the numbers of people going there just to play. The contrast within the city was so steep, that it seemed obvious that any made made by the casinos didn't trickle down to the society. Or maybe they had inherited the Portuguese chilled out attitude that led to run down building fronts?

On our first night in HK we went out to see what the night life was like, and after several pints of beer in SoHo (South of Hollywood Road) we wanted to see more of the island took a completely random bus that took us to the south side to Aberdeen. We found a nice noodle shop and ordered some food, and started talking to the people in there. We made friends with King, who then invited us for Sunday lunch. So yesterday we went for a very nice Dim Sum lunch in a floating restaurant with King and his wife Bella, followed by a popular Hong Kong pasttime - horse races. We betted again on number seven, and literally lost by a neck. Oh well, even 10/10/10 wasn't our lucky day!

And then finally a bit of good news. We went to the Fortune Tellers near Wong Tai Sin temple and had a look into next year's events by stick fortune telling. My question was if my boyfriend will finish his studies, and the answer was yes as he will work hard, but unfortunately he will not find a job straight away and will have to take some time out to travel to six countries! And then he might become prime minister later on.