To the Buddha

At about 3pm, we left for Lantau Island and the Big Buddha (aka Tian Tan Buddha). You have to take the MTR to the island and from there you take a cable car up to the very top of this mountain, walk up even more steps, and finally make it the man himself.  The cable car ride up was beautiful, even with the fog. Although you can normally see all the way to the Buddha, fog made the trip a bit more serene and mystical. We were cutting the trip a bit close so we hiked up to the main steps pretty quickly in order to have enough time before the gates closed.  After an exhausting hike up the steps, demonstrating how out of shape I really am, we made it to the top and could look over the little shopping area we had just left.  By this point, most of the tourists had gone home so our group had the Buddha practically to ourselves.  The surrounding view was gorgeous with misty mountains and forest as long as you could see. We did not get to stay long, but I enjoyed the trip. We went with some of the other exchange students so we all have a fun time together!

Group with the Buddha

For the next few days, we didn't do too much, just classes and wandering around close to school, and lots of eating.  We had another Thursday evening in Lan Kwai Fong bar district and went to a bar on the 28 floor of a building! Crazy! The "clubs" in HK are pretty intense and mostly filled with foreigners. Lots of house music, lots of dancing, lots of extreme lights. Andrew and I went out another night with some of our crew and the bar was very different than the normal.  At first there were not many people, mainly exchange kids, and then more asians started filtering in with their cigarettes, sitting in large booths. Andrew referred to this as a "modern speak easy" feel, which was completely true. It was neat to see the locals out because usually we never do where we go! Another evening we went to see The Expendables and asked the girls at the reception desk at school where an English movie theater was. They looked at us like idiots and proceeded to tell us all movies were shown in English. Good to know. On the way back we wandered past the light show again, but on a much clearer night than before!

Light Show

The last semi-interesting thing to speak of for the week was getting our visas to China. For almost every other country, there are tiered prices depending on the amount of time and entries you wish for China. For Americans, we have a flat fee straight across for HK$1100 no matter how long you want to stay in their country. We had to wait for about 2 hours to get up to the desk where we had to LEAVE our passports until we came back to get our visas. What a horrible feeling! Anyways, the plan was successful and we got our visas in time for our trip to Beijing! What made this trip even more successful was our stop in SoHo on the way back to school for Mexican food!

Mexican and Margaritas!