Wanderings in Hong Kong – Part I

by chriscrews · 06/06/2013

On Tuesday, my first full day here, I had some siu mai (燒賣) in a cup with chili sauce poured over and a red bean bun. The siu mai was pretty good, and it’s always fun eating food with a skewer out of a cup! Apparently this is a dish that varies a lot by region and taste, but is basically a pork or prawn steamed dumpling. It is also a common part of many dim sum offerings. Along the way I also wandered along the north shore of Honk Kong by the Wanchai Stadium and sports complex, as well as the Convention and Exposition Center. Here’s a panorama shot looking out from one of the walkways in this area, looking north towards Kowloon.

While on the way to the area above I ran into a small celebration going on in the street, which I found out later was advertising some sort of bank securities for one of the local banks.

The next day my friend Shalini and I wandered around the city, and one of the places we visited was the Hong Kong Central Library, which was awesome! This is a huge building with multiple floors and was really cool. There was an entire floor dedicated to just kids books, with a full playground inside!

In the mid afternoon we wandered around Victoria Park and surrounding areas with my friend Shalini, who is also part of the ICKCBI program. During our wanderings we went by the Tin Hau Temple and Gardens, which was pretty fascinating, and apparently has a connection to why Hong Kong has its name. See the slideshow for a photo with the story about this.

This is a close-up of the Tin Hau temple door. There was also a very ornate set of carved figures that appeared to be narrating some kind of story, but I wasn’t able to tell exactly what it was. There was also a small altar and incense offering bowl with the signs of lots of incense offerings, as well as some more stone animals. I’m obsessed with dragons, always have been, but I am also coming to love the stone lions, and I’ll be p0sting a section of just these images as I travel.

Later that evening during our wanderings we decided it was time for dinner, and stopped into this little Thai restaurant, where I had a dinner of sweet and sour fish fillet with greens and a hot lemongrass ginger tea. Quite good. That a bit of my first several days here, more to come soon.