We decided to walk through Kowloon on our second day in Hong Kong. While most of the modern and financial area of Hong Kong lies on Hong Kong island, the more locally-flavored and residential area is in mainland China, in Kowloon. We had a lonely planet guidebook with a walking tour through the markets of Kowloon so we set out to do that.
We started off with the bird market. This is just a small area filled with birds in cages for sale. There were also crickets and weird little white frogs for sale ... maybe the birds eat them?
The bird on the right in the first picture below was doing flips over his bar in his cage. I really wanted to buy him. If I lived here, my house would be filled with birds. Actually, I'd probably set them all free.
Next we wandered through the flower market. This was several streets lined with flower shops and with flowers spilling out onto the street from each of the shops. It smelled amazing. If I lived here I would be here every day buying flowers.
The shop here was selling orange trees. There were tons of orange trees all over Hong Kong. They stand for good luck, I think.
Next up we wandered through the streets a bit and just got a feel for life in Kowloon. There were some more street markets, there's practically one on every street. The really big market is called the Ladies' Market and is filled with purses, clothing, and assorted knick knacks and decorations. We got a lot of shopping done in all these markets - lots of fun ideas for gifts for friends and family plus some things to hang on our walls in our eclectic-themed home. We buy something for our walls in every country we go to and now our home is filled with too many different things. We think maybe we should just make one room our "international room" and hang everything from our travels in there. We haven't decided yet.
We stopped at a sushi place for lunch and the menus were on tablets. You just selected what you wanted on the tablet, hit "place order" and it came to your table when it was ready. No waiters necessary.
Some pictures of all the big signs that hang across the streets:
We took a boat back to Hong Kong island, to take a brief siesta before our evening activities.
Our evening activity was a boat trip on a traditional Chinese junk ship to see Hong Kong at night. There is a laser and light show every night but it's not that impressive. More impressive is just seeing a city with so many skyscrapers and lights at night.
This was a very busy day, but I think Hong Kong is definitely one of the most different and interesting places I've visited. If anybody has only one day in Hong Kong I would tell them to do exactly the itinerary that we did today.
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