Hong Kong mkay. Tomorrow: Hanoi, Vietnam

Inom de senaste dagarna har sol blessed us with its energizing rays (my first Swenglish sentence), for which I am grateful.

On Saturday evening me, Natalie and Silja got pissed after having a fantastic day in Mong Kok (north from Kowloon) - eating the best stuff so far in Hong Kong: all kinds of dim sum. Natalie, with her sleek Canglish (Cantonese-English) managed well to order us a very wide variety of such delicious cuisine that I can't even say.. Well done, Nat! Actually, when we initially entered the restaurant the first thing we heard was "yat-yat-yat", which was kind of hilarious for some reason ;). Yat = 1 in Cantonese. Anyways, after the restaurant we went to the ladies' market to do some shopping. To my amazement I also bought a white shirt to wear in the malaria-infested areas. Not too thick (I hope) but should keep the mosquitoes away (knock the wood).
Anywho, after grabbing a few beers from the local 7/11 we found ourselves consuming them in my and Silja's extremely small private suite with good music, lot of good pictures, youtube and some funny pictures, which were posted in FB :). OK, so feeling high we felt somewhat hungry again. This I must commend: our hostel lies in an area infested with curry-eating and talking-with-their-t's-changed-to-d's Indians. There's a few good counters, from which we've eaten lot of authentic (mutton,chicken) curry and other weird Indian stuff whose name I now can't remember. It's been good. Yeh, but we ate some good curry before heading out to the Central. The best bit of it must have been two guys playing drums and a bagpipe - they played 'Scotland the Brave', which was worth videoing. Meanwhile I lost Nat and Silja because I was too much in flames to pay attention where they went (sorry). Eventually, I found them (or was it another way around..? =)). Everything was so damn expensive that we did not actually enter any place. We just went again to 7/11 and grabbed some more juice and danced in front of clubs :P. It wasn't long that we decided to retreat back to the hostel room. We had a few more but felt tired, so we kinda fell asleep.

On the next day - Sunday - we had so relaxing time in the Kowloon park with Silja! Helsinki, could you try to have something similar please? Tai Chi, Kung Fu shows, amateur musicians playing music (with pro equipment tho), all kinds of animals in a very relaxed environment, sun shining, people enjoying the greens and trees, the ponds, eating ice-cream, nobody's making a ruckus, just enjoying the care-free Sunday.. Nichhe! Evening ended with investigating the Hong Kong Space Museum, which was good: it was well organized, had English language, the material was very concise and not too plentiful and explained in layman's terms. Very good and compact space museum.

On Monday, Silja and me headed up to the nearby island of Lantau. It's main attraction is the giant bronze buddha high up the hills. We took a bus to the highlands, where we visited the buddha, the monastery-thingy, saw the path of wisdom (the last wooden tablet of the path was empty, reflecting the ultimate state of mind in Buddhism), climbed high up towards the Lantau peak (reached halfway, very sweaty, but the views were magnificent and what's most important: no tourists in sight, just soft wind, the sun and the beautiful scenery. Peace. We also went to uncharted trekking paths, saw some cute puppies and stray dogs as well as an abandoned altar, where we paid our respects to the buddha. After having a vegetarian meal in the monastery I headed back for Kowloon, since I was supposed to see Avatar (in an IMAX theater, very niccchhhee) with Natalie in the evening. Silja had seen it already in Beijing. The theater was very good in every respect. The only complaint was that we were late reserving the tickets (on Friday-Saturday night) so we had seats from the first row. Needless to say, necks were quite fucked up after the 3-hour marathon of watching the skies. Nevertheless, the movie itself with its storyline, effects and the deeper meaning was well beyond enough to make myself feel good about paying 168 dollars (HK) for it. After the last dinner in HK it was time to say goodbye to Natalie. Byebye, hope to see you soon Nat! Cod. Yat-yat-yat. Dis-gusting. Fuuuuu-uuuuu-yuan. Innit. Mgoi! Fart-trail. Scissors. Oh-my-cod.

AND tomorrow it is time to leave China completely behind as we will begin our journey into Indo-China with Hanoi in Vietnam. Our hostel is supposedly quite good, hope we'll get there before being scammed by some bastards. Did not seem there would be that much to do in Hanoi (just some museums, parks) so maybe it's just trying to suck in the local atmosphere, people and especially the food.

Hmm. Yeah the pics they are kinda tricky as the speed of the current network is not so great. Maybe I should use facebook for this..So far managed to avoid it. Well, I'll try to post some of them at some point.

Hong Kong signing out.