Live long and prosper Tea

With great sadness we left Tokyo behind us, after all a great source for blog posts. Our next flight was to Hong Kong provided by Cathay Pacific. If you have the opportunity to fly with Cathay take it, you won’t be disappointed, at least we weren’t. We arrived in the late afternoon, grabbed a taxi to the hotel, dropped our luggage in the room and went off to the IFC shopping mall to spend some serious money. Our hotel was surrounded by small shops selling everything from shark finns to various types of live-long-and-prosper-tea, the freshest and best you can get. Finally arrived at the IFC - DG store we were told that our laptops would be there in half an hour (even the laptops are fresh). After killing some time with a nice cold beer, we got to play with our new shiny MacBook Pros. Back at the hotel we decided to setup our e-mail accounts and saw a somewhat surprising ING Card e-mail asking us to contact the ING Card service team. Our credit cards were frozen because of a big transaction in Hong Kong by a “DG Store”, how odd :). They enabled our cards again, we uploaded our photos and went to sleep.

We started our next day a bit later than usual and decided to get some breakfast at the Shun Tak Centre shopping mall. From there it was a short walk to The Center building which functions as the world’s biggest clock by representing the time with colored lines. We couldn’t figure it out and continued our way to the Midlevels area. A few quite long outdoor escalators bring you to the higher parts of Hong Kong. We took a short pit stop at a local Starbucks and enjoyed a frappucino with Frosty the Snowman playing in the background. Descending back to The Center building we made our way to the Bank of China building, unique in its shape and its many triangular glass plates covering it from top to bottom. Continuing our walk we strolled around a small church almost crashing into a Chinese wedding… not being invited we moved on to the higher grounds of Hong Kong: The Peak. Unfortunately there was a three hour wait time for the Peak Tram which brings you to the very top of Hong Kong, so we settled for the Botanical Gardens. Let alone the flora and fauna, this is one of the few places in Hong Kong where you’ll find a bit of rest and quietness. On our way back to the hotel we visited Hollywood street with the Man Ho temple. Upon entering the temple you see a lot of big incense spirals, all slowly burning, affecting your eyes and lungs. It’s too bad that Buddhism isn’t more popular in The Netherlands, because temples like these make for a great coffee shop.