king of (hong) kong

our first stop was hong kong, where my old mission companion michelle was the perfect hostess, not to mention a total trooper spending all day out and about with us with a baby in tow. i loved seeing hong kong, but i loved catching up with her and meeting her little family just as much.

with michelle as our guide we hit all the must-sees, including...

macau, a former portugese settlement that is actually a different country even though it's just an hour-long ferry ride away, which meant more stamps in our passport. hurrah! the portugese had the good sense to list all their historical sites with unesco before they transferred power back to the chinese in the 1990s, so all the old historical buildings are still standing. there are also a lot of casinos. we didn't bother with those.

hong kong island is basically a big mountain, and you can take a tram up to the peak and look out over all the splendor. so, we did.

and, if you happen to need to travel from the residential mid-levels to the business district, known as central, you can just take the commuter escalator. during morning rush-hour it goes down, transporting all the morning commuters, and for the rest of the day it runs up, bringing everyone back home. i thought it was basically the coolest, most brilliant thing i had ever seen.

we also hit some downtown markets (one for knock-offs, one for jade),

watched the famous hong kong light show (in the rain!) and then took the famous star ferry home,

and took a cable car to the world's largest seated outdoor bronze budhha, all those qualifiers being really important as without any one of them he wouldn't qualify as the world's largest anymore.

hong kong was an easy place to visit and a great place to get our feet wet. after three glorious days there, our adventure was well under way.