The Blog of E.M. FitzGerald

Ahh, to sleep in. Well, I slept in to a point I must admit. If you count getting restless sleep on a thin mattress in a shoddy room that is freezing cold, then I lived it up! Amusing how things change so quickly. My room in Thailand was a palace compared to my single bed in Hong Kong.

But I digress, after being tired from lackadaisical sleep my friend Nick and I headed out “on the town”. “On the town” essentially means right outside the front of the building, as our lodgings are located in central Kowloon. To start, we decided to get our bearings a bit and see what was around. Jewelery stores dominated the cityscape surrounding, at least on the ground level. We walked into a Burberry store, one of the 5 within a 5 minute walk to admire? the expensive clothing that to be honest, is a bit bland in my opinion. After scouring the landscape in the rain for something to do (it had been raining non-stop since we arrived), we decided on the Hong Kong Museum of Art, which happened to be directly across the street. We made up our minds quite quickly, because it seems that if it’s raining in Hong Kong, there really isn’t anything to do.

To get into the museum costs 10 Hong Kong dollars, just over $1 dollar U.S.D.. I thought that this was a deal, considering that the building is rather large and there were many exhibits. I do however, tend to get a headache if I am in a museum for too long, and I hoped with all my might that on this day that would not be the case. Walking through the art galleries, I found that my favorite section was that containing the scrolls of calligraphy. I am a sucker for anything historical, and there were many amazing works from the 18th, 17th and 16th centuries. There were other exhibitions as well, but a majority of those were “modern” art, which I still cannot understand for the life of me.

After the galleries, we had lunch at the museum restaurant, which turned out to be quite tasty and cheap. After taking our time with the food, we strolled (or rather hurried) down the Avenue of the Stars which happened to be just outside. Since it was raining there weren’t any people on the avenue, and since it is open to the elements, I got rather wet. Regardless, I got my pictures of the stars of: Jackie Chan, Chow Yun Fat, Bruce Lee and Jet Li, as well as the statue of Bruce Lee.

From there we headed to the Space Museum, which to be honest was something of a drag. I have been to many a fine space exhibit in my day, which must have skewed my perspective as all the exhibits were routine and there was nothing original. The children all around us loved it though, and they were swarming to the various interactive parts of the museum.

After finishing the 1st round of museums on the trip, Nick and I headed for one of the seemingly endless malls around Hong Kong. This one had an Omega watch store, much to my delight. I have a think for anything that James Bond wears or uses, and in Casino Royale he happened to wear a Omega Seamaster watch. Naturally I went into the store with no desire to buy anything (as I couldn’t afford it), the employees there didn’t know that though. As a matter of course, I went into “fake shopping” mode. Fake shopping is essentially pretending that one has enough money to buy expensive things, trying them on and admiring them as though they were nothing, then politely handing them back to their owners for safe keeping.

The first watch I tried on was the very same Seamaster watch that Bond wore, and of course it was well out of my price range at several thousand dollars. I tried on a few more, the most expensive of which cost about 20k, then left the store with the Omega catalog in hand, which they were nice enough to give me. Happy at my non-purchasing I returned to the mall and looked around at all the worthless things that are generally sold in malls until it was dinner time.

Nick and I went to a mall called iSquare to eat, and the food was tasty and very fast! We ordered and withing 5 minutes it was at the table. I had roast goose and bbq pork on rice with almond milk. A most tasty dinner for less than 150 HKD, excellent. After the food feast Nick and I returned to our room. Tired, full, and content to start another day.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 4th, 2010 at 6:22 am and is filed under Hong Kong. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.