Downtown

Something I had yet to do in my time in Hong Kong was go to the most popular destination, seeing the skyline of Hong Kong and Kowloon and going up to the peak of Mt. Victoria. I had been waiting for a nice clear day to go and this day that finally arrived, so as soon as I finished classes I took the MTR to Kowloon where after taking a few pictures from Avenue of Stars, which is a deck that runs along the Harbor, I got on the Star Ferry to cross the harbor.

View from Ferry

 

Cool Buildings seen from Hong Kong Park

Central Skyline. Triangle building is Bank of China, Tall building is IFC II

After walking around Central for a while, including going to Hong Kong Park, and taking lots of pictures of the cool buildings. I was ready to take the Peak Tram up to the top of the peak. The Peak Tram is a rail line that connects the top of the peak to mid-levels and was made so people living at the top had easy access to the bottom. Unfortunately for me, my journey was during the one week of the year where it is closed for maintenance; thankfully I can go back. Instead, I took the bus up the mountain, which takes a lot longer. In the end this cancelation ended up working in my favor. On the bus I sat next to a white guy, who looked American/Canadian. Eventually we started talking and had a good conversation about travel throughout the region. He was a professor at Rutgers and was in charge of their study abroad program. He even taught a class on Skyscrapers there, at the top we ended up separating because I wanted to go to the top of the Peak Tower to watch the sunset, and he had already been.

I went up to the top of the Peak Tower and watched the sunset and then did some homework while I waited for the light show to start at 8 pm. The light show was pretty unexciting, especially because they didn’t play the accompanying music. The only cool part was that I could see that there were buildings pretty far away from the harbor that still participated. After the show was over I walked back down to the bottom of the mountain using the trail. It was a very long walk that ended in the mid-levels where I got a chance to photograph the escalator.

Sunset

View at night.

Midlevels Escalator

When I got home I looked up the guy I had met on google, because we had not exchanged contact information. I found him on Rutger’s website, his name is Seth Gopin. And he is a pretty neat guy. He is a French knight, and was once the official voice of the Tibetan government in exile to the US. I sent him an email, and surprisingly to me he responded rather quickly, and we arranged to meet up the next day to walk around Central and then go to dinner.

 The next day after classes were over, I took the MTR to Central and met Seth in the lobby of the Bank of China building. We got passes to go to the 42^nd floor of the building, and took then went up and took some pictures from above. Afterwards we walked around the city looking at the buildings, and he explained to me the architecture behind them.  It was very neat. There is a lot about the buildings that I would have never noticed. And he knew interesting history, like that the Bank of China building is so not Feng Shui that some people wanted to tear it down when it was originally built.

Notice the reflections everywhere. This creates the opposite effect as a vanishing point.

View from inside Bank of China building

After exploring we walked to his favorite restaurant, which serves Sichuan food. All of the food we ordered was fantastic, it was probably one of the tastiest meals I have ever eaten. The dishes were spicy, but the coolest thing is the effect of the Sichuan pepper corns. Sichuan peppers have a mild topical anesthetic in them, so they make your mouth numb when you eat them, which turns into a tingling feeling in your mouth. It almost feels like spicy but not really and it goes away after awhile. It was a cool experience. I hope to stay in touch with Seth in the future.

Excellent Sichuan Dish. You have to dig through it to find the part you eat.