Goodbye Hong Kong

I feel really sad. It was so great when I first came back, but now that it's time to go, everything just seems such a rush. I really love my hometown, the dynamism, the efficiency, the freedom, the food. It's what I'll never get anywhere else, especially not where I'm going back to.

Flying by yourself has this feeling of power - it's like you're in charge, you're in control of where you end up. After saying goodbye to all my relatives who came to see me off, I walked through the huge terminal and snapped a few photos along the way. I really like this airport. It's just so spacious with the high ceilings and glass exterior. And everything's blue - my favorite color.

I thought I'd just take a picture of this rather odd box where smokers can unite and commit suicide together. It's such a disgusting habit. And if you note closely, there's one guy who's passed out inside already inside the glass encasing.

I took about 20 minutes to get to my gate. It was a good walk - I didn't want to take the trains, so that's why it took that long. I knew it was inevitable that I'd have to leave sooner or later. I just wanted it to be later.

And for my faithful readers, thanks for all the support over these two months. I hope you enjoyed the pictures.

The Peak

This is the best view of Hong Kong yet. From here, you can see right down to the business district, with the jutting skyscrapers of all shapes and sizes, past that to Victoria harbor and on to Tsim Sha Tsui and Kowloon. The wind blows on your face like a rushing current and you try your best to keep your eyes open. Sometimes, if you're lucky, the clouds actually touch ground on the peak, and it's like walking in a fog, but not today, today was clear.

We had some Movenpick ice cream here (which I thought was really overpriced). It was actually quite a hot day, typical of a Hong Kong summer, even with all that rain

This is peak tower, with a good viewing station and lots of restaurants. There's a shopping center in there too, where my grandma bought a pair of shoes. To me, it looks like a giant soap dish. And look at that castle-esque house on the very top of the peak. I'd love to live there someday. Someday.

Festival Walk aka Another Plaza

Admire, one last time, the intricacies of the escalator system of yet another shopping center. This one's probably the most screwed up one up till now, for not only do they crisscross and fly over one another, these designs are mimicked identically all around the plaza, making it hard to know exactly where you are, even if you know where you want to go.

According to my aunt (second sister of mom's), Festival Walk took quite some time to build, because they had to dig into quite a rock of a mountain for its foundations. It has an extremely deep carpark, located at LG2. It is located at Kowloon Tong, a very important interchange where the KCR Rail and the MTR meet; so it's easily accessible.

But as with most shopping centers in Hong Kong, besides their architecture and interior design, the place is pretty much generic - just another plaza, and literally in this case. For the developers were too busy digging through the rocks that they slacked off on the task of giving it a name. In Cantonese, the shopping center is called 'you yut sing' which, directly translated, means "another (one) plaza". Of course, they couldn't call it "first plaza", because there's already one in Sha Tin ('dai yut sing'); and even more obvious, they couldn't call it "another plaza" in English, so they had to go with Festival Walk, which has nothing at all to do with the Cantonese name. Alas, it was not very festive when I went there - not the second time either.

Managed by Swire - which is the better of the property developers in Hong Kong when it comes to managing shopping centers - it too, like Cityplaza (see previous post), has an ice skating rink. This time, I couldn't miss the chance and decided to have a spin on it with my cousin. It cost HK$60 a session, which lasts 2 hours if you go in at the earliest time possible, which we did. This also included rental, but not the locker; everybody else just placed their shoes all over the place, so we followed.

The ice wasn't that bad, and this rink was rather big - definitely bigger than the one at Cityplaza. And I just loved how those windows opened up to the sky (it looks better in the day), which made the ice look like a ledge off an iceberg; the rink, though, was called the Festival Walk Glacier (website below). I gave my cousin a 101 on skating and did a few quick rounds myself. It was exhilarating gliding across the ice. It wasn't all that crowded, because it was a Wednesday, so there was lots of space to maneuver. It got quite warm inside my sweater after a while, despite the cold, so I decided to skate with only a tee, which made the laps I was gliding even more fun, as my skin cut through the icy air.

So I ended up with sore legs and a sweat. We had dinner after that at the restaurant overlooking the rink. The place, called EXP (short for experience), was a fusion diner serving pizzas, ramens, pastas and noodles. Don't bother looking for a review at Thought for Food, because I didn't like it that much. Reminded me too much of Nooch in Singapore, which is just a dreadful place. But EXP did serve some really beautiful pizzas, with killer crusts. Two ticks overall only, though.

I've finally figured out why all these ice skating rinks. The plaza really saves a lot on air conditioning bills.

http://www.festivalwalk.com.hk/

http://www.glacier.com.hk/

Jurassic Park invades Cityplaza

There's been a lot of coverage in the news about this exhibition. The bones are from a museum somewhere in China - didn't really care because I didn't even know museums were approved by the government over there, except for the ones extolling how great Mao was.

So, this is just one of the gimmicks shopping malls pull to get people to come - and boy was it a success. We got there early at around 10am in the morning, so there weren't a lot of people around. But by 11am, the place was crowded and people were queuing to get into the exhibition area.

Cityplaza is actually one of the older shopping malls in Hong Kong, and one of the better managed ones. Swire, the British group that manages this place (and also owner of Cathay Pacific) does a good job at it; it seems like their shopping malls are always better managed, better than the ones run by local mega conglomerates anyways, like SHKP and Li Ka Shing.

The shops here are great too. (Check out their website, below.) There's also an ice skating rink. Next door is Jusco, a Japanese department store the size of Walmart, where you can buy just about anything. The decor does seem a bit old fashioned, but most of the place has been through quite a few makeovers. It's like the nostalgia of the 80s shopping malls (with their round columns and abusive use of reflective surfaces) mixed with modern and postmodern add-ons. And the floors of the mall are not oddly numbered; nor were escalators winding traps of no return. It seems like older developers had more sense back then.

The entire place is in the middle of a private housing estate (which also happens to be the best run in Hong Kong, as indicated by the stable property prices even in the face of SARS and the Asian financial crisis, and despite most homes being over 30 years old), which is great if you live here. Maybe someday, I'll get an apartment here. Besides, it's super convenient being just above the Tai Koo MTR station.

Here's another picture of the exhibition space. I counted 11 dinosaur skeletons in total, but there may have been more. You'll also notice the rain coming down on the skylight.

http://www.cityplaza.com.hk/

Raindrops keep fallin' on my head

A very brightly lit street, on which traffic zooms past, somewhere in Tsim Sha Tsui. Hong Kong is famous for all those neon signs hanging over its streets. I just love the night life. This was taken around 8 o'clock in the evening, but let me assure you that come 2am, the street will pretty much be the same.

It's been raining like crazy for the past 7 or 8 days; there were a few bad floods today, in fact. (Those smart ones out there would have noticed the wet streets in the first picture.) Well, like the Americans with their terror alerts and the Australians with their UV warnings, the Hong Kong people have rain warnings. The most severe is black, where people don't have to go to work or school. Red is the second highest, followed but other colors which I'm not all too sure myself. Anyways, I went outside and looked up into the sky, but the cloud dripping its raindrops on my face wasn't red. Quite disappointed, really - but my spirits were already quite dampened by the weather.