Hong Kong, Day 2

I tried to post this yesterday but the internet wasn't cooperating with me.

So yesterday I overslept and woke up at 9:45, which is a huge luxury when you consider the way the rest of this month has been going. It was a day of walking, is what it was. We hiked up to the top of Victoria Peak. Most people take a terrifying funniculare, but we were bold and took a footpath up. It was very slow going and we would've been frustrated, I think, except that we could check our pace against a nearby skyscraper and see that, for example, we'd hiked roughly 80 stories of vertical distance in around 45 minutes. Sweaty business.

Let me explain that last part. Victoria peak is a giant steep hill covered in thick foliage and for that reason it hasn't been built up like, uh, the entire rest of Hong Kong. Also I think it's a protected natural/historical site. So there's this beautiful, shaded nature trail in the middle of a forest of skyscrapers. Very bizarre. At the top of the peak are two malls. Hong Kong seems to be built around the principle that at any minute, you might have a Shopping Emergency, and the city has kindly protected us against this sort of emergency by putting retail opportunities absolutely everywhere.

Also we had dim sum, which apparently is mandatory.

A word about the first picture: Sunday is traditionally the day off for domestic workers. They don't want to hang out in their employer's houses (where they live and work), so they take to the streets in vast numbers and have an all-day picnic. They were absolutely everywhere on Hong Kong island. Well, everywhere they wouldn't get kicked out of. It was strange to see crowds of fairly poor people camped out in front of luxury shops like Bvlgari and Louis Vuitton, reading books and snoozing. They seemed fairly relaxed, but I think it's obvious that they wouldn't be out on the streets if they had anywhere else to go, and for that reason I felt sort of bad for them.