Click on images below to enlarge:
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| Kowloon
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| Looking south down Camarvon Road.
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| Breakfast at "Relax for a While"
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| "Relax for a While" is a casual, diner-like joint.
| The restaurant's Chinese name.
| My steamed rice noodle roll with BBQ pork.
| The menu pages listing steamed rice noodle rolls (eight types, including
mine) and many flavors of congee. The Chinese for my item includes some
traditional characters, not simplified characters, and some characters that
are only used in Cantonese, not Mandarin. From the fourth character
onward: cha1 shao1 (the Cantonese char siu = bbq pork) chang2 (intestine)
fen3 (noodle) (i.e., noodle wrapped to look like an intestine).
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Incidentally, the menu included six dense pages of noodle soups, which
they usually called Shanghai noodles in soup.
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| More Kowloon
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| Kowloon Mosque.
| Hong Kong's statue of liberty, perhaps?
| A 180-degree panorama of the north shore of Hong Kong island.
| A single high-resolution picture that captures the left half of the
previous panorama. At left is the Avenue of Stars, which I visited on Saturday.
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| A close-up of the Central business district with one skyscraper, the
International Financial Centre Two (IFC2), lost in the clouds. It's the
7th tallest building in the world as of 2009 when my guidebook was
written.
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| Ferry Across Victoria Harbor
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| I rode the Star ferry across Victoria harbor. This is another Star Ferry,
much like the one I took.
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| Hong Kong Island: Central District
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| Looking north across the harbor From Hong Kong island one sees another of
the world's tallest buildings (also lost in the clouds): the International
Commerce Centre (ICC). It's taller than the IFC2.
| The clock atop Central Pier, a ferry terminus on Hong Kong island.
| Crazy construction.
| Ditto.
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| A pretty escalator in Exchange Square, home of the Hong Kong stock
exchange.
| The rowdily nicknamed "House of a Thousand Orifices" actually the Jardine
House.
| Many elevated walkways help pedestrians navigate this traffic-ridden part
of hong Kong. Indeed, as I realized over the course of the day, much of
the district could be reached with these walkways.
| Hidden on streets of regular retail establishments, Li Yuen Street West is
a dense lane of hawker stalls.
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| Li Yuen Street East.
| A pedestrian side-street, Theatre Lane, photographed because I bought a
snack at the bakery at left and because I browsed Liu Li Gong Fang, a glass sculpture shop.
I'd previously tried to visit an outlet of it (in Shanghai) but found it
closed. Some of the glass sculptures are amazing, and fairly priced (in
my opinion) at a thousand dollars (US) or more.
| The Legislative Council (legco) building, perhaps the only old building
(built in 1912) in this part of HK. It has interesting looking fountains
out front (one appears in this picture).
| Legco again. The angular gleaming skyscraper at left, said to have bad
feng shui, is the Bank of China Tower. The girdered building at right is
the HSBC building.
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| My first glimpse of Hong Kong's hills.
| Charter Garden.
| I went up to 43rd floor of the Bank of China Tower for its
what-turned-out-to-be-lame observation deck, which only viewed in one
direction. This is a video of what I could see.
Incidentally, the
observation deck also had a scale model of the area made in 1988, when
this building was still the tallest around.
| "A unique building" was my original caption but then I noticed there were
two buildings. :) These comprise the Lippo Centre.
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