A packed day in Hong Kong

There were many things on the agenda. After realizing that I needed to book a ticket to Phuket ~ with Marc's assistance, I had secured a ticket. The challenge getting tickets in Asia however is that most things can not be booked online like you can in North America. Despite finding the available flight, you still need to contact the travel agent and then you need to go and then comes the challenge of paying them for the ticket. They do not accept credit cards over the phone, so you need to either fax them a copy of your credit card or go and put some money in their account and hope they know you paid for it. I opted for the latter and having a 4pm deadline, I think I chose unwisely. I ended up spending over 30 minutes behind 40+ people in line at the HSBC. Do these people not know about ATMs?!?

Once that deed was done, Beth and I headed over to the Ladies Market. Here you can find anything from clothes ~ including underwear, to purses ~ common line being 'copy purse'/'copy watch', to shoes and trinkets of jewellery.






Despite the many offerings, I managed to keep the dollars in the pockets and we wandered over to Fat Angelo's for dinner, seeing some neon along the way...



Dinner was an italian feast, which Beth and I enjoyed dinner before going out to view the lights of Hong Kong. Similar to when they put the lights on Niagara Falls, there is a nightly show of lights which are lit up on many buildings which is synchronized with music which is played outdoors. Apparently during the holiday season, this is a very popular place where things are decorated to the hilt.







I then travelled across the water on the Star Ferry before heading home. The ferry plays a very important part in the overall transport scheme, shuttling people from downtown Hong Kong to the nearest area Kowloon ~ basically the other side of the river from downtown.