On Hasaam of the World!!!

Day #7
Funds: $7250ish
Location: All Over The Shop, Hong Kong
Michael is up way too late!

Ahhh what to write? Well, I've had my train ticket to Shanghai since the second day, I'm leaving Tuesday 18th, may have mentioned that already ... thanks to the fact that I can get up in the morning here and catch people online in the afternoon, I've sort of dumped lots of random feelings about this place on whoever was available at the time, or whoever asked the right 'trigger' question to set me off on a rant about how the roads here make no sense sometimes and perfect sense like I never dreamed of at others, or how even the traffic is polite despite being packed and pushy, or the impossible-to-figure-out code-switching situation (language-swapping), or any one of the many other delightful little paradoxes I've observed in the past 7 days. Fortunately I've been taking as many photos as will fit in the camera most days so I'm sure anyone who's been interested has a rough idea of what I've been up to. A couple days have seen me just get up in the morning, and leave with a vague idea of where I was gonna go, and then stumble around completely at random soaking in as much as my scattered little mind could take for several hours, and since a lot of this involves stairs and hills I pretty much collapse when it's over. Most of these sessions have been followed up with a bit more of a focused trip led by either Debbie or Matt & Nico. Matt is the guy who gave Debbie my details before she came to Australia last year, by a happy little coincidence it turned out he arrived here to see his girlfriend Nico a couple days ago. He's also vegetarian, so knew a nifty little place in one of the buildings (of course I would never have thought to look if I were alone =P) we could go and order literally anything off the menu, which is of course a rare treat no matter what country I'm in ^^ Most of the time, unfortunately, I don't seem to remember the names of the places I go to since I just don't personally find them distinctive enough. I'm pretty sure that's just because I'm still not used to all the crazy stimuli! Besides, it's important to remember that distinctive =/= awesome all the time. Usually it's been not too far from my lil cupboard, TST (Tsim Sha Tsui) is supposed to be 'in the middle of everything' so there you go.
As the Day #6 photos pretty much say, me and Chun Hin caught up and went to see the Tian Tan Buddha yesterday, which was cool.

And here we can see that this statue of Buddha is actually so large that it can be seen from satellite images ^^ It's not too far from the airport, but of course you can see exactly where it fits in by zooming out. You can only get there by chairlift or a pretty massive hike, kinda like to think I wouldn't have minded the hike, but definitely wouldn't have been up to it considering all the other walking I've been doing lately.

This was the closest the map'd let me zoom. But that's where the awesome beach is. More on that from today's photos =]

I'm sleepy ... so I think this'll be relatively brief. Things I learned about Hong Kong so far:

1. Connex sucks. MTR (their equivelant) does not. Public transport in general mops the floor with us. I've never had to wait more than 4 minutes for any train here, and today was the longest I ever had to wait for a bus - slightly under 20, because we just missed the one before it.
2. The Octopus Card kicks arse, although I have no idea why they called it that. We were supposed to have something similar last year in Melbourne but it never happened. Basically you load it up with prepaid cash and then you never have to buy a ticket, just swipe your nifty lil card as you walk through and it calculates the cheapest possible fare at the end of your trip! You can also use it at Macca's and 7/11 and a zillion other shops. So the fact my wallet can't carry coins isn't such a big deal here, hehe.
3. 7/11 doesn't rip you off here, usually their products are quite good value. Some supermarkets still do, some quite badly.
4. There are tons of one-way roads, so many that there are some total intersections where every pedestrian light on every corner turns green at once. That's nuts.
5. There are arrows on the road telling people crossing the street which way to look. They look very much like the arrows in Australia telling cars which direction to drive in. As such, certain foreigners who may or may not keep blogs keep looking in the complete opposite direction.
6. People in Hong Kong speak Cantonese as a first language. Many have English (or a slightly altered version of it) as a second language, so that's pretty handy for tourists from an English-speaking country. Unless it turns out they actually speak Mandarin as a second language instead (which can happen for a bunch of reasons). There's really no way of knowing until you try both, so it's convenient if you come from an English-speaking country where you studied Mandarin. Of course, turns out there's quite a few who only speak their mother tongue, which is fair enough. It just takes a whole bunch of awkward lines of conversation to establish which is true for every individual you wish to interact with.
7. Having both the internet and a tv in my bedroom keeps me from sleeping at a reasonable hour despite my physically knackered body begging for it. Goodnight =P