Hong Kong Trip Part IV

Tuesday started out with some more exploring on my own. I went back to Marble Street, which is lined with stall selling all kinds of things. Of course, I was most interested in the food.

Produce, fish, meat, and all kinds of dried things (mushrooms, seafood, beans, teas, etc.) were everywhere. No American health inspector would eat any of this food. Some of the concerns I would share (meat being butchered right next to produce guarantees cross contamination) and others I would not (the lack of refrigeration of the raw meat is not an issue when the meat is butchered in the morning, sold in the afternoon, and cooked in the evening - bacteria need more time than that to grow to the levels that cause illness) The butchers who were smoking while cutting the meat did gross me out a bit.

After my wanderings, I met up with Monte and Finn for a trip to the midlevels. We rode a doubledecker bus (why don't we use doubledeckers in the US? It would double the capacity of each bus. Are there too many low overpasses in our urban areas?). Finn had a music class after lunch, so I set off to see the antique shops on Hollywood Road. I have a few things to buy for gifts and for my house, but I decided to wait until our visit to the Stanley market tomorrow. I can easily return to Hollywood Road on Friday.

One of the interesting things about this part of Hong Kong is the outdoor escalators. I must say that if I lived in Hong Kong, I would lose weight despite all of the dumplings I would eat. You walk everywhere, and even with outdoor escalators, there are countless stairs to climb. It has been rare to see anyone here who is overweight, even among the wealthy.

After dinner, Matt had an ultimate frisbee practice near Causeway Bay. I headed over there with him, stopping for some fries, and then checked out the nightlife (no, Janet, not that kind of nightlife). The streets were full on this Tuesday evening with students and young office workers and a few tourists.

The main activity was shopping, not drinking. The Times Square Shopping Mall has 8 stories of shopping and a crazy number of stores. For as huge as the mall is (close to a million square feet of shopping plus another million of office space) each individual store was quite small in comparison to US malls.

I did a ton of walking on Tuesday, so I was rather exhausted by 10:30. Jet lag has not been much of a problem. I have been going to bed and waking up earlier than I ever do back the states, but that just puts me more on the schedule of a normal person. I'm afraid that the return home will be more difficult in terms of my sleep schedule.

The rest of the pictures from my trip can be found on my flickr site.