Today, we had a walking filled day in the Kowloon part of Hong Kong. Honestly, this area isn’t my favorite- if you love shopping and tolerate masses of people better than I do, perhaps Hong Kong is a better fit for you. However, Perry really wanted to see China and without visas, this is about as close as we can get (although to me, Macau seems more like mainland China than Hong Kong so far). We spent a considerable amount of time walking on the various promenades as we kept getting dead ended in terms of places to see.

First stop for us (after figuring out the subway system and walking about twenty minutes) was lunch at a famous dumpling shop, where we got Xiao Long Bao (XLBs), fried rice, and a sweet and spicy chicken. They helpfully included a guide for us to use, so we followed it to a tee.

The soup dumplings were great- and went really well with the sauce they suggested. The fried rice and sweet/spicy chicken were pretty delicious as well. This was our main foray into the mass of shopping malls that seem to cover Hong Kong- seriously, if something isn’t a hotel, it’s a shopping mall.

We went to the maritime museum and the old tower that accompanies the old clock tower near the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. The Hong Kong Cultural Centre is nice, although we discovered that we were in fact looking for the Hong Kong Discovery Heritage Centre. Fortunately, a helpful security guard attempted to corral us into the “marriage registration” line that was forming outside where we thought the entrance to the “exhibition” was. We quickly realized that we weren’t getting married and moved on. This was the first of many fails that occurred today. However, the area surrounding was nice.

Then, we headed to Kowloon Park, which houses the correct cultural center, which ended up being a slightly disappointing, if mildly informative, museum about the artifacts which have been discovered on Hong Kong and date back to periods of Chinese history. We played a fun game there called “termite exterminator” where you have to kill the termites infesting an old Chinese building, which was the highlight of the museum.

The Kowloon park is nice; we walked through it briefly when we moved on.

We had heard good things about Nathan Street and the Shanghai Street area, which supposedly house beautiful markets and authentic Chinese shops. Well, if Chinese people are into sketchy adult entertainment shops more so than anyone else (which I doubt), that could explain the wide variety of seedy shops we found ourselves among. However, we did find the temple market (closed) and a temple (filled with a very uninviting, rude, and aggressive worker who shooed us out almost immediately despite it clearly being a public, tourist friendly temple – perhaps I should have read more into the dismayed expressions of the family that walked out just before we attempted to enter).

Then, we caught the subway back to the promenade area, since that seemed far less seedy. We attempted to get high tea at the Peninsula Hotel, but realized that it costs about $60 more than the high tea at the Raffles (oh well). So, we skipped that and attempted to get coffee with a view, but that was closed as well.

Basically, we kept dead ending, so we headed back to the hotel to relax for a couple hours. We ended up getting dinner at a restaurant near our hotel, which was a very old school experience. We got soup noodles again, with me getting the Szechuan soup noodles, which was essentially like hot and sour soup on steroids. It was pretty good overall.

We aren’t exactly sure what we’re going to do tomorrow, hopefully catch the cable car to a different island and see some more sights.