Second Day of Sightseeing

Yesterday, 3 other RA's and I went to Victoria Peak. It's one of the tallest mountains in Hong Kong, and is located on Hong Kong Island (where my mom was born). To get there, we took a bus and the metro like we did the day before.

The metro is probably the best kind of public transit that I've ever been on - the ride itself is amazingly smooth, and the stations and trains are impeccably clean. Another positive aspect of taking this public transit is that economically, it is cheap (only about a dollar per ride!). It is funny being on the train and looking down the train corridor - you can see the train going up and down, and bending both ways. I took a video to try to show you, but it's not super obvious. In this clip, it's mostly going up and down.

To get to Victoria Peak, you have to take the cable car to get up the mountain. On the way up, there was a sign saying that the incline is only 14 degrees....but the RA's and I thought it was more like 30. When we arrived at the top, we were spit out into a mall. That is pretty typical of Hong Kong in general - lots of stations are next to or attach to malls.

Me, Callie, Brianna, and John

The view! We are on Hong Kong Island, and in the distance you can see Kowloon and the New Territories.

After Victoria Peak, we took the ferry to Kowloon to go to a dim sum restaurant one of the RA's looked up. The ferry was also inexpensive (under a dollar US - I have no clue how they make money since there were about 10 riders on the ferry that could hold hundreds). The restaurant was pretty good, and I tried my best to use my dim sum experience to order dishes! Of course, I asked for ha gao, su mi, and bok choi. I was a little surprised that we ordered the dishes instead of picking them out from carts like I have experienced at home. The attention that we got from the servers was pretty funny - they definitely hovered around the table to show us how to properly eat the food. Some of the RA's were eating the rice noodles plain - and one server practically shoved one RA's hand that was holding chopsticks out of the way so he could correctly dress the noodles in soy sauce! Let's just say that they definitely wanted to show their ignorant American diners how to eat their food properly :) .

We returned in the evening for the mandatory traditional chinese banquet dinner for staff members. All CTY staff seems really nice, and the dinner was delicious!

This is the last picture of the post. I thought that everyone would enjoy seeing what we spotted on our walk to the trolley:

I hope that my posts haven't been too lengthy, and that everyone's summers are going well!