Tuesday

Evergreen Hotel, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Tonight is our last night in Hong Kong before we fly to Thailand.  We’ve been busy being lazy and Hong Kong is a wonderful city for doing that.  On Sunday we slept in and missed church.  We went to see the Hong Kong Space Museum down by the Star Ferry terminal at the tip of Kowloon.  We met Mary, one of the students from the center there.   She’d got scammed by someone and was making out a police report.  Afterwards we went to dinner at the Hard Rock Café.

On Monday, Evan and Yeongmi and I took the subway out to Tsuen Wan at the end of the red line and went to see the Sam Tung Uk museum.  This is a refurbished Hakka home that is now owned by the Hong Kong government and is used as a museum.  It was vacated in the mid-1980’s when Tsuen Wan was being developed and the owners of the complex, the Chan Family, were given new housing and a new ancestral shrine as compensation.  A Hakka farmer who had immigrated to the area from Fujian Province built the original house in 1786. The original complex was a walled compound with three rows of buildings.  The center of the last row of buildings housed the ancestral hall, where the tablets of the family’s ancestors were kept.  The rest of the building was used for housing for the extended family members who worked the nearby rice fields.  As the family grew, an additional row of houses was added to the back and to the two sides, maintaining the rectangular symmetry of the layout.  Inside, the houses each had a kitchen and storeroom just off the entry, which was open to the sky.  The inside of the house was divided into a loft and a lower level to maximize the usable living space.

From here we walked over to the Tin Hau temple in Tsuen Wan.  This temple was originally built in 1846, but has prospered since the increase in Tsuen Wan’s population and now has several newer additions to the old buildings.  The temple, like the one in Kowloon, honors Tin Hau, a goddess of the sea dear to sailors.  It is said that she was born into a poor fishing family in Fujian and later dreamed of rescuing her brothers while they were at sea in a storm.  After she died, several sailors reported instances of being saved at sea that were attributed to her help.  In1673 she was promoted to the status of a “Queen of Heaven” in the Taoist pantheon.  She is one of the most popular deities in Hong Kong with several dozen small temples throughout the area.

After this we took the subway into Tsimshatsui and had lunch at a Korean restaurant in the tourist section of Kowloon.  We then stopped by an electronics store and bought MP3 players for Evan and Lynn; a sort of delayed Christmas present.  Next, we went to see an exhibit on Buddhist sculpture from an old temple site in Shandong Province that was on display at the Hong Kong Museum of Art.

In the evening, I went with Lynn and Yeongmi to the Ladies Market on Tung Choi Street near the Mongkok subway station.  This part of town is where most of the locals shop for bargains and it was much bigger and more crowded than the night market on Temple Street near our hotel.  Yeongmi bought some pants and a hair clip.  We got some T-shirts for Evan and to bring back as gifts.  I went shopping at the computer market on the corner of Fa Yuan and Nelson Streets.  I bought a CD writer to use on the laptop and my office computer at the center so that I can easily backup all my work and bring it home in July.

This morning we were all so tired that we woke up very late.  After everything got squared away, Yeongmi and I went to lunch at a wonderful little place just around the corner called the Macau Restaurant.  They serve Portuguese style cuisine from Macau.  We had a couple of curry dishes that we liked so much we went back again tonight for dinner.  Next we went to the Hong Kong Museum of History and took the audio tour.  Then we came back home and did laundry and other chores.  In the afternoon, Lynn and I went to visit the Wong Tai Sin temple in Kowloon.  We rode the subway out to the Wong Tai Sin station and it was easy to find.  This temple is modern, having been built in the 1970’s.  It is a huge complex and was worth the trip as it was so crowded with worshippers.  The courtyards were filled with people burning incense, burning spirit money in the ovens, throwing then bamboo fortune sticks, praying, etc.  The area was so crowded that there were security guards on hand to make sure that only authorized persons entered the halls.  Everyone else had to stay out in the courtyards.  The temple’s main hall is dedicated to Wong Tai Sin, but there is also a hall to Confucius and one to Manlius, and various other local deities.

Our Chinese Names

Photos in Hong Kong

• Commuter Escalator

• Ladies' Market

• Nathan Road

• and lots more...