This morning I had a deserved lie in, and only left the hostel at 10:30. today I had planned a visit to a few markets. I took the MTR this time (bot too far to walk) to 'Monk Kok' terminal (the name did make me giggle just a little). There was a very good clothes market going on there, with replica watches, wallets, handbags and clothes, but I'd seen all this last night. I was heading on to more interesting markets. One was the largest fish market in kowloon where locals got their omega 3. You could buy all kinds of crazy things. Lobster, prawns, shrimp, lumpfish, frogs, squid, crab, turtles (is that legal?) and every size of fish possible. If you ordered a fish ( a foot long cod would set you back around $25) they would hand pick it out, cut it's throat, scale it and gut it for you in a matter of seconds. they were very professional. The next market was called the goldfish market. This was truly spectacular, with every shape and size of goldfish you could believe being sold by their thousands. As well as this there were massive coral displays with tropical fish and shrimp everywhere. In one store you could buy a twenty foot long tank full with live coral, hard and soft, and fill it with fish, shrimp starfish, the lot. It was stunningly beautiful and has given me a very real aspiration for the future, but I think owning live coral is illegal in the UK... The third market was the Bird Garden. This was less than good in my books. I had been so impressed with the other markets that I had high hopes, but the stalls here just made me sad. Birds were held in cages stacked on top of each other, barely big enough for them to spread their wings. Bird crap was everywhere, and even the parrots and love birds were packed into a 2ft cubed cages with ten or twenty in each. My heart broke completely when I saw a Macaw parrot at the back of a stall in a tiny cage, dirty as hell, completely mistreated with it's wing and tail feathers broken and bent. It wasn't good, so I left there pretty quick.
That night I walked down the 'Avenue of Stars', a Hollywood style boulevard where Chinese film stars have a start placed in the floor and print their hands. It all meant nothing to me until I saw Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee. Then I was excited. And for a small guy, Jackie has some massive hands! At 8 o'clock Honk Kong puts on a light and sound show by the water front, where twenty odd buildings join in with a light display set to music. It is described as Hong Kong's main attraction and is crowned the largest permanent light and sound display in the world by Guiness world records, but I wasn't that impressed. The music was fun though. The kind you would expect at a little kids singalong show in China, great fun to bob along to.
The next day, Lantau Island was on the agenda. It wasn't the best day to chose due to weather conditions: over 100 degrees and 86% humidity it was hell walking around I felt dizzy most of the day. The whole point of the trip was to see Po Lin monastery and a giant Buddah. It was all very cool. The Giant Buddah is surprisingly big, it really is a piece of artistic and engineering genius, sitting at 110ft tall. But, after a short while the heat got to me and I headed back to Kowloon for some airconditioning.
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