After our late night the day before it was a fairly relaxed start to the day. I met up with Priscilla and Ben for a late breakfast/early lunch around 11:30 in Causeway Bay. Ben took us to a chinese place nearby which was very good. We had shanghai dumplings, chicken, veggies and noodles.
After lunch Priscilla and I headed off to visit Lantau island. On the island they have the largest sitting buddha in the world. To get there we took the speedy mtr service and then took a cable car. The views from the cable car were pretty awesome - you are right by the airport as well so plane spotter geeks like me can see all the planes taking off and landing.
The cable car took about 15 minutes to get to the top, as you came over the last section you could see the buddha in the distance. It was a pretty impressive sight. We later learned that the buddha was only built around 15 years ago. For some reason I always expect religious monuments to be a lot older.
Before we visited the Buddha itself we went to see a short show about the origins of buddhism. It was like a disney version of the buddha story - quite interesting to watch for me as I really didn't know much about the religion before. It is helpful as we are going to be seeing a lot of Buddhist temples in south east asia. Priscilla even took some notes so we can share the four truths that underpin the buddhist theology with you:
There is suffering in the world
Suffering arises from craving and attachment
Suffering can be eliminated
Right views and the middle way are the keys to eliminating suffering
Ok, before you all think I am turning in to Richard Gere I will get back to the days events. After the show we headed towards the buddha. On the way we took some photos of the buddha. Taking inspiration from some locals I tried to take a photo of Priscilla high fiving the buddha. After lots of posturing and changing the angle I got some shots but these were declared useless by Priscilla as the hands were completely different sizes. Priscilla then tried to take me in the same pose and I ended up getting a sore arm with all the posing. Fortunately we were more successful taking photos of Priscilla in a buddha pose. I didn't even attempt that given my previously discussed lack of flexibility (need to work on the stretching!)
We climbed up a lot of steps to get to the top of the buddha hill. We walked around the buddha for a bit but in reality ot was more of an impressive sight from afar. As we were leaving we saw some foreigners (german or something) people hanging their kid over the ledge deliberately to scare her which was complete madness. It reminded us of wacko jacko.
We headed back to town and got ready to head out for dinner. We were having dinner at Eugene and Thui's place. Eugene is a former colleague of Steph's from when she was an i-banker at solomon, and Thui is his wife. They moved to Hong Kong a year ago and have a really nice apartment here. Eugene was cooking us hairy crabs for dinner. As the name suggests these are crabs that have hair. It was his first time cooking them but he did a great job of cooking them and they were very tasty. We competed with each other to see who could get the most meat out of their crabs.
After our dinner we relaxed at the apartment for a while. Eugene and Thui are trying to set up a business selling printed clothing and they showed us some of their designs which were pretty funky. They look a bit like african style. Hopefully it can work out for them - they are trying to get manufacturers for their designs now.
Later Priscilla and I headed off to meet up with Ben in causeway bay. We went to a hotel bar and met up with a couple of his old colleagues from PwC in Hong Kong one of whom had also spent time in New York. It was interesting to get their perspectives on the differences between working in New York and Hong Kong. Apparently people work even harder in Hong Kong than they do in New York and your boss will have no qualms about calling you on Sundays about work. This kind of but me off the idea of working in Hong Kong a bit.
After a couple of drinks it was 2am already and time to head home. We headed our respective ways and I went through my usual ritual of going all the way up to the 17th floor of my hotel to discover my key didn't work and had to go back down again. This may not seem that big a deal but when you are all set to collapse in bed I can assure you it is a big pain!
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