Думки вголос: Trip to China

12.07.2014

My first impression of Hong Kong (HK) was that it’s like Coruscant from Star Wars – a huge city with lots of light and skyscrapers, metal and technology everywhere (not everywhere good looking, though). The fact that my hostel was in a big building with several blocks (each of them should be accessed by a separate lift) and lots of traders in the ground floor only strengthened that impression.

The place was very crowded, first of all, I suppose, because of its location – Nathan Road. And in the evenings there were very long queues to the lift.

And when you get to your hotel room, you understand that the crowdedness of the city can be seen from the size of the room.

But, well, a bed, a bit of space, and a shower, and a huge city to explore – what else do you need to enjoy a weekend?

On my first day in HK I went to the Big Buddha statue in Po Lin Monastery, which meant that I had to take metro and enjoy my trip to Lantau island.

By the way, do you know what changes when you complete a course on providing first aid, like I did just before going to China? You start noticing such labels:

AED stands for Automated external defibrillator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_external_defibrillator), and the label tells that it’s available at this metro station.

So, once you exit metro, you can either take a bus to the monastery or a 20-minutes long (!!!) cable car trip. Guess what I chose.

If you take a car with transparent floor you can feel like entering the Matrix.

After passing a gallery with lots of shops (Don’t use them – they are very expensive. However, what would you expect from a shop at a tourist attraction place?)…

…you get to the Buddha statue itself.

In an exhibition under it you can read about its production.

By the way, did I not write that in summer in southern China it is always good to have an umbrella with you? You can use it to protect yourself either from the sun or from rain.

After a lunch in the monastery cafeteria I thought that maybe being a vegetarian (as all Buddhists) is not a too bad idea – the lunch was very tasty.

Apart from the Buddha statue, the monastery and the park around it are very nice themselves.

An important thing: allow yourself plenty of time to get back to the cableway. In the evening I had to wait for about an hour in the queue and finally got into a cable car quite near the cableway closure time.