Hong Kong

AND Week three was spent in Hong Kong - with a day trip to Szenzhen... As you will see from these photos, Hong Kong was warm. It was strange to be in 70 degree weather a week before Thanksgiving. It was BEAUTIFUL there!

One of the many adventures we took was to see the largest seated Buddha. He is located on a hill that you can only reach by a tram. It is a 20-30 minute ride on the tram. To get to the ticket booth you had to go up these amazing stairs (They say welcome in many different languages).


From the tram, there were AMAZING views. These are some of the students and me. And my favorite sign in the trams...








Seeing the Buddha was also pretty awesome. I don't think the photos truly capture the enormity of the statue but it was impressive.







At the same monastery - where I would have loved to spend more time - there was a Wisdom Path through which you could wander and reflect. Or sprint through and take as many photos as possible :)



After the Buddha visit, my Buddhist explorations extended the next day when I went to a nunnery with some of my students. There was a GORGEOUS garden connected to the nunnery and a lot of rules for the garden.



My final adventure in Hong Kong was to see a garden that had an aviary and an Olympic square... that was actually a circle... And the Olympics have never been there... but it was fun to play in the rain and impersonate the trash cans at the play area (I won't post the student's pictures as they may not want those on the internet).




So, as I hope you can tell from this photo journey, I had a blast in China and traveling with the lovely people pictured below. I can't wait until my next traveling adventure!



I leave you with some of the food that I enjoyed while on the trip, as that is one of my favorite parts of traveling. First, you will see the amazing dumplings I had in Beijing. They were even good cold, two days old.



These are sugar-coated crab apples - a Beijing Tradition I was told.


My Shanghai top food was hot pot. Something that should be in the US, if it is not. Basically you have a pot of hot broth and then they bring out plates of things to cook in the broth (the veg variety was lots of 'shrums and greens). You drop things in and then let them cook, pull them out and dip them in the dipping sauce (that you prepare from the sauce buffet). It was tasty.

In Hong Kong, the traditional food we had was milk tea with sticky buns. These buns had sweetened condensed milk drizzled on them (As you can tell Philisile and I were very excited for them).


Happy Holidays!