On Tuesday morning Veronika and I alone again embarked on the adventure of discovery the city. We started on the main island and went to look for some parks and shopping malls nearby. Despite city being so huge, you get a feeling there are parks around every corner. And no some small parks, but they are quite big, full of vegetation a lot of them have mini zoos in them as well.

And in these parks you see all kind of people, from children (well it was school day so not that many children) to adults playing with their toys. As I later learned its normal to see adults playing with RC toys etc. since they didn’t have time/money when they were young they do it now.

Another thing I really liked was tons of walkways, lifted from the main road, going through the buildings and bringing you anywhere you want. There is even the longest escalator in Hong Kong going over 800m in distance and 140m in elevation – and all this on the street beside sidewalk. Hehe seems like some people there really don’t want to walk.

After walking whole morning and failing to buy anything from expensive malls we met with Maggie in the afternoon who took us again to Bang Kok – the largest stall market in the city. There were stalls everywhere and really a lot of people wherever you looked, it was quite hard to move actually.

We bought quite a lot of things this day, from souvenirs to counterfeit bag that was around 200€ cheaper than original, but looks surprisingly same as original. The bottom nominator for all purchases was haggling. I personally didn’t like it but at each thing you bought be it few € to 50€+ you haggled to get your price down. I managed to get the chopsticks from 30€ to 10€ and Veronika lowered the price of the handbag for more than 70%.

Next day – Wednesday morning we again went alone to the city. Near the pier on the main island we found a double decker bus tours that drove you around the city. We took it and it was really fun to ride on the upper deck, where wind breezed around our heads. Well it was fun until we went through the tunnel below the sea – at that point we thought we are going to suffocate.

Using bamboo for construction on tall skyscrapers.

After about an hour of riding we disembarked near the Avenue of Stars.

Because the air is usually so polluted, you can’t see the city on the other bank, they have this big billboards so you can take a picture as it were clear weather. And for some reason they have a picture of Paris as well.

After taking some pictures we decided to find something to eat. This ended up in us walking for 3 hours through the city, and finally giving up in finding something local that looked safe to eat and going into a first McDonalds we could find.

At this point we were already quite lost, I think we were somewhere in the middle of Bang Kok area, having no internet meant no GPS from Google maps, so yea, we were lost. On our way of aimlessly walking to find subway we went through some really big markets again full of fresh fish. How do I know they were fresh? They were still alive in the aquariums.

This area was exactly as I imagined Hong Kong before coming here. Thousands of people, stalls everywhere and stalls were selling anything you could imagine. A lot of exotic fruits, minerals, precious stones, flowers, trees, meat… There was one area where they were selling thousands of exotic fishes for aquariums (like pets – not for eating). And oh boy were they expensive, some fishes had price tags at over 400€.

After walking for another 2-3 hours we must have looked really lost because someone actually asked us if we are lost and if we need help. He quickly gave us some directions to get to the metro and voila, we were saved. 🙂