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I don't want a watch, or a suit, or a bag or a massage, or a lift on your crappy bike thing! Oh my god, how many times we had to say this! We wish we had the Thailand T-shirts which tell the pests you don't want anything! We have never seen so many designer shops in our lives, for anybody rich (most certainly not us at the moment) it would be heaven!
Anyway, we got into Hong Kong and took the bus to Causeway bay on Hong Kong island which is the very expensive part, but we wanted a good location. We needed to get our Chinese Visa's fairly quickly so went straight to the consulate on the way to Causeway Bay. It was a reasonably quick, but expensive process which got us a next day Visa. Ben noticed a Chinese guy staring at him for the whole 10 minutes Lisa was inside signing her forms (we each had to wait outside as no bags were allowed in...plenty of single travelers had problems) and ended up chatting to Eric K. Chui (possibly an English first name???) after giving him the "are you looking at me?" look! It turned out he was looking at the badges of all the countries we had been to on our bags and was really friendly. We ended up taking a taxi with him and his friend to Causeway Bay and we checked into the same hostel there! Then we went out for the evening!
We had heard that the Peak Tram gave you fantastic views of the city, so we headed up there (but missed out Madame Tussauds), but there was a random Bruce Lee in the hallway! The views didn't disappoint, they were incredible and we pottered around up there for a good hour or so before getting some food and heading to Temple Street Night Market, where the real hassle began!
Temple Street market was a Knock-Off-Nigel's heaven. Thousands upon thousands of fake-branded goods for dirt-cheap prices (well after some serious haggling)! The fakes looked very very good too, identical to the real thing in many cases. We ended up in some Fort-Knox type apartment after walking down some backstreet, up two lifts, down a few corridors, through some security gates, through what seemed to be a jail cell and into a box-room, to see a huge monitor with around 20 CCTV cameras from around the building showing this Cantonese guy who was in or around the building. Then he pulled out an array of watches, bags and purses which looked real, but of course were fake, The Rolex's were automatic and even had the sweeping arm! You could not tell they were fakes, unless you knew they were! In the end, we felt a little uncomfortable and left, thankfully, we were allowed.
The next day, we had a walk around the city, visiting 'The Avenue of The Stars', which included Jet LI, Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, Chow Ming Fat amongst many others (similar to Hollywood Boulevard). Then we went to the Hong Kong Space Museum where you can take a simulated moon-walk and has many astronaut-like interactive games. We then headed to the Golden Bauhinia which is the flower (Hong Kong's symbol and flag) and is where we handed Hong Kong back to the Chinese.
On the evening we headed out to Temple Street market for some local food, which was very nice, did a little shopping then walked over to Kowloon for the Symphony of Light show, which is the biggest permanent light show in the world and has tons of lights coming off from all of the skyscrapers! Then we had an early night as we were up early to cross the border!
We really enjoyed Hong Kong and it felt very much like a nice, easy warm-up to China in terms of the culture shock we are about to encounter!
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