Today we had a much needed free day with time to explore whatever we wanted in the city. I stuck with two friends the whole day and had a fantastic time! First, we took the subway to Lantau Island to see the Ngong Ping village and giant Buddha statue at the top. We discovered that Hong Kong Disneyland is also on Lantau Island, but I’ll get to that later. The train was really easy to navigate and once we got there we headed straight to the cable car terminal. After a little bit of a wait in line we got to go in a pretty cool cable car that took you up the mountain. It was a pretty long way up and had amazing views. There is also an option to hike up the mountain, but that takes like 3 hours and did not sound fun at all. Once we reached the top there is a little city and monastery. All of it is fairly new and clearly built to be a tourist attraction. We had some pizza for lunch before continuing to see the big Buddha. You could see the Buddha from the cable car and it looked out over the whole city but you had to climb up 250 steps to get up to the top and see the statue up close. It was pretty neat and gave some great views of the water and islands below. We explored the town and the monastery a little bit before taking the cable car back down to the subway station.
We decided that since we were out here we would go check out Hong Kong Disneyland. Disney has a special subway stop built and has a special Disney themed train that picks you up and takes you directly to the park entrance. We didn’t actually pay to go inside, but we walked around to see the entrance and the hotels. It isn’t a very big property so it wasn’t hard to walk around. My group project is about tourism and we focused on Disney as a case study so I got to take some good pictures for the project. It was definitely fun to see and it would have been nice to have time to actually go in and have fun in the park.
Then we took the subway back into the city to see the Mong Kok shopping area with a famous market called Ladies Market. It was another place with stalls of fake designer bags and such but also had more variety of trinkets and things too. The prices were much higher than the Silk Market in Beijing but the stuff was definitely of a little bit better quality. I bought a bunch of stuff again and I’m happy with all my purchases! We had dinner at the classy establishment of Pizza Hut (it’s a nice sit down restaurant in China, ha!) which was delicious and then we headed back to the hotel on the subway. I’m very proud that we navigated our way around the subway and stuff all day. Now I’m exhausted from being out in the sun all day and have some work to do before our last day tomorrow so I will have a busy night.
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