Saturday morning I woke up at 7:30 local time. Considering the prior night, I would have slept later but the clock in our room isn’t illuminated in the dark and all I knew was it was light outside. Once I found my phone and checked the time, it seemed pointless to go back to bed.
We ate breakfast at the hotel buffet which was very good and included a wide variety of European and Asian breakfast items. At first, it looked like Calvin was going to demand noodle for breakfast until he saw the mini-pancakes. After breakfast, we went to the small grocery store across the road and picked up cheaper breakfast items for the rest of our stay.
With eating out of the way, our next task was to get an Octopus cards for MTR, the local subway system. I love this subway. It’s the best one I’ve been on yet. Each train shows the route and has lovely flashing lights to indicate which direction the train is going as well as which station is next. Naturally, Calvin was enthralled with the ride.
After getting off the train, we wandered around in circles for a bit but finally managed to track down the store of a local cell phone provider. Verizon was kind enough to unlock Jaeger’s phone for international locations and my cell phone was already unlocked so it was fairly simple to get SIM cards so we could make calls to each other while in Hong Kong. We also got a data plan with Jaeger’s phone to help us navigate the city (though it’s obvious that Google maps is a lot more comfortable in the US than Hong Kong).
Our next stop was lunch. We had been warned that it’s hard to eat vegetarian in Hong Kong unless you go to dedicated vegetarian restaurants so we wandered, only in small circles, to a place to eat. The menu was a little overwhelming as it still seems odd to me to have more than a couple vegetarian choices to choose from. We ended up with a noodle dish, an interesting soy milk soup dish, and some dim sum. Unfortunately, it was way too much food for us but it was good.
Our original plan after dinner was to take the Victoria peak tram up the peak. However, when we got there the line was 1 1/2 hr wait. I didn’t think Calvin could deal with that so we decided to try again another day. Instead we wandered around some of the parks and visited an aviary. Wandering around Hong Kong I’ve been amazed at how many communal spaces there are. There are beautifully landscaped parks and mini-parks all over the place. Also, there are tons of playgrounds. It seems like every time we turn around there’s an entirely new playground. Naturally, Calvin wants to try them all but if we did that, there wouldn’t be time to do anything else.
We ended the day going to a tea museum and then having tea. I got an Oolong tea that included an interesting preparation that involved, among other things, pouring some of the tea water over the pottery tea pot. By the time we left the tea shop everyone was dragging a bit so we decided to head back to the hotel.
Calvin was upset that we hadn’t taken the promised tram ride so to make him happier, we decided to take the streetcar back instead of MTR. In retrospect, that may have been a mistake. Calvin really enjoyed it in the beginning but the streetcar stopped often and it felt like it took an hour to get back to our hotel. Calvin fell asleep half-way back.
Back at the hotel, we successfully transferred Calvin to bed and then decided to claim that 8pm was a reasonable bed time for us as well.
Our Hong Kong/Taiwan Trip: