Day 4:
Today we went to the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery, Kowloon Park (two of them actually, will explain later) and the Avenue of Stars. It was a big day!! Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery is technically not a monastery b/c monks do not live on the premises, but it has no joke over 10,000 statues of Buddhas. 500 are life sized and the rest are little figurines. Each statue has a different pose and expression. Some wear accessories, some hold props, one with a really long right arm, one with very long legs and one with arms coming out of it's eyes! We also recognized the Buddhas that Logan photographed for the All-Yen Collaborative! We walked up 400 steps to the main temple and the closer we got the smell of incense filled the air. The main temple is lovely. The walls covered with mini Buddhas from floor to ceiling. At the top is a vegetarian restaurant where we had a very good meal. We'd never had deep-fried bean curd before and it was surprisingly very tasty!
Next we headed to Kowloon Park…or so we thought. When we got there (after a very long walk)
we saw it was very small and Kowloon Park is supposed to be huge. After walking around for a moment, or two, I noticed the sign said Kowloon Tsai Park. I looked at the map and scanned all of Hong Kong until there it was…Kowloon Park, no Tsai. Really??? Oh well, at least we got some extra walking exercise in, which believe me we need after all the noodle eating!
As we were walking up to the correct park we noticed there were large groups of women sitting on the floor eating and talking. At first we didn't know what to make of it, but then we remembered it was Sunday. Logan told us that the Philippine community in HK have big gatherings at the parks on Sunday. He wasn't kidding! It was a huge party!! I'm not very familiar with Philippine food, but it looked like they had the works. Pots and pots of food! The only thing we didn't understand was why it was only women. Where were all the men?? Who knows.
Kowloon Park is awesome! It has play grounds, Chinese gardens, maze garden, sculpture garden, a bird lake and an
aviary, just to name a few. The bird lake had Black Head Swans, Flamingos and different types of ducks. The aviary had a great variety of species of birds including types of Macaws, Toucans, Crowned Victoria Pigeons and Peacocks. Unfortunately, I didn't get good pictures of them b/c of the cages. We didn't get to any of the gardens b/c it was getting dark, but we did make it to a playground so Raelynd could blow off some steam. Hong Kong is a melting pot, so it was enjoyable to see children from many cultures all playing together. That's the marvelous thing about children. They will play with each other no matter cultural differences or even language barriers.
When it started getting dark we made our way to the Avenue of Stars, which is HK's Walk of Fame. The strip over looks the water and across is Hong Kong Island where every night at 8pm there is a light show. We got there halfway through the show, but it was great nonetheless! The night view of HK Island is spectacular! It's pretty similar to the view of NYC from Hoboken. We walked around for a little, although
we didn't recognize most of the Chinese actors names. However, we found Jet Li!! We looked for Jackie Chan, but there was too many people, so we gave up. Howeverf course, we had to check out the statue of Bruce Lee! Needless to say, there was a huge crowd surrounding it, but I managed to get a good photo.
We felt very accomplished after this day! Extremely tired mind you, but satisfied.
Album: HK Day 4
Day 5:
Ocean Park day!!! Ocean Park is an amusement park, but better! It is like Busch Gardens and Sea World combined. They have rides, roller coasters, games, trails, animal exhibits and a huge aquarium. There are two sides to it, The Waterfront and The Summit, and to get to either side you have to take a cable car. The Waterfront has games and The Summit has rides, but they both have animal/sea creature exhibits. Raelynd wasn't tall enough for all the rides, but she got her fair share in. There is really not much else I can say that the photos won't do
for me, so enjoy!
Album: HK Day 5
