30.09.05, Hong Kong

A visit to the Tin Hau tample in the morning. I mean the biggest Tin Hau temple. There are several temples in Hong Kong and most of them are named Tin Hau, much like most big churches in Belgium are named Onze Lieve Vrouw.

You are supposed to behave yourself on the temple grounds.

The temple is fairly small and green. It looks exactly like one of those restaurants that are built to look like Chinese temples. Inside it's red and full of incense, and people come here, ask Tin Hau (that's a very popular goddess) for some favors and go away. Outside people are selling paper cars and suchlike that the worshippers can buy and burn and thus send to their deceased relatives in the other world. It is not clear what the deceased relatives need a paper car for.

Sheung Wan looks like a nice neighborhood, although it is full of shops selling some unidentifiable things.

Aberdeen is nice too. Here, like in many other places in Hong Kong, they have a mini-temple on a street corner.

Aberdeen harbor is full of little sampans that function both as taxis and as tourist rides. An ancient trident granny offers me a half-hour tour for $50HK, and I accept. She summons a sampan driven by a less-ancient multident granny, and I climb in. There are no safety precautions at all, you just step from a totally handrail-free embankment onto a car tyre in the front of the sampan. Not a ride for drunk people, but then I am sober. Local grannies hop to and from sampans with the same ease as London grannies hop to and from their scary buses.

The harbor features poor people's houseboats, rich people's houseboats, and huge floating restaurants.

Going from Aberdeen to Stanley - a beautiful bus ride. Stanley is not very impressive but has a nice outdoor market. Benka wants a funky watch, and I am not sure what she considers funky, so I buy 5 of them for about 4 euros each.

Repulse bay has a beautiful sandy beach which probably has at least fifty thousand trashcans. I like the buildings around it, too. There are lifeguards and shark nets out in the sea, but they still warn people not to swim during a shark alarm.

The ride back to the northern side of the island offers some great views. The sun is big and red and so clouded you can look at it directly.

In the evening I go shopping. DVDs (at least local ones) are hard to buy but I manage to find quite a few, and VCDs too (why are they so popular here? why?). I even find a few made-in-mainland-China Russian DVDs and try to buy them for my grandma but the cashier points out that grandma might not appreciate DVDs dubbed in Mandarin. Bought some books, too, and a few tiny little bottles of perfume. Also bought the best eyeliner ever: Meilin waterproof. Doesn't run, doen't smudge, doesn't irritate my eyes. Costs 1.5 euros. Should've bought more but who could have known?

For a change the dinner is in Spring Moon, a rather expensive restaurant in the Peninsula hotel. Worth every penny. too. Great food and great service, although drink (even water) prices are unspeakable. They recommend abalone soup and stuffed scallops. I am not sure what the scallops were stuffed with but whoever stuffed them sure knew what they were doing.

After dinner it's picture time again: Central viewed from Kowloon waterfront, the waterfront itself and Kowloon viewed from the upper deck of a bus.

Most of those neon signs are by the way held in place by bamboo sticks. Looks a bit scary but they seem to stay put.