hong kong day #2

breakfast today was amazing.  we had a tradition taiwanese breakfast of hot soy milk and a fried donut-type thing.  oh.my.word.  {sidenote:  the next day we tried to find this place again, and couldn’t.  sad day.}

if you could walk through one of the hong kong markets in the morning, you would be awestruck with the poor handling of meats.  {i haven’t gotten sick after four and a half weeks in asia, thank goodness}.  nevertheless, the markets are so fun to walk through.  everything is different than in america, which makes it so exciting.

after breakfast and the market, we made our way out to the temple.  {one thing we have learned on this trip:  i am directionally challenged.  i could walk five minutes in one direction and be instantly lost.  john, on the other hand, remembered where to go to get to the temple from four years ago when he was here.  if he weren’t here, i swear i would have spent many hours wandering aimlessly through the streets of hong kong.}

don’t you just love our lds temples?

at the temple, we met missionaries and we asked them for recommendations of what we should go see.  they told us to take a trip out to monkey mountain.  since john and i love monkeys, {did I just admit to that?  look here for more evidence} we definitely wanted to go.  so, we hopped on a train with literally no idea where our final destination was.  after a lot of asking bus drivers if their route included monkey mountain, one of them spoke english and got us headed in the right direction.  so, we went to monkey mountain and hiked for an hour and fed the monkeys and got bitten by a trillion mosquitoes.  we even saw a brand new baby monkey!  she was so tiny and still covered in a little bit of monkey amniotic fluid. {sorry for those of you who aren’t nursing students….}

 

and for lunch, we had soup that “was hotter than the fire of a thousand suns,” as john put it.  i’ll put it like this.  put this soup in your freezer for about ten hours.  take it out, eat it, and it will still burn everything going down.  they let you choose how spicy you want your soup, and i stupidly chose “very spicy”.  “very spicy” in america is very different than “very spicy” in hong kong.  “very spicy” in hong kong means you might as well take a razor to your tongue, because that’s what it felt like. 

after the monkeys we went up to mong kok specifically to get dong gua cha.  we wouldn’t really admit that that’s why we were there, but that’s totally why we were there.  when i get back to the states, i am going to make john take me to that taiwanese restaurant every single day so i can get it.  otherwise, i will go into withdrawals and potentially die.

 

and then we fell asleep in our hotel room for about three hours, woke up groggily, and decided that we had to see the skyline at night, or we would be sad to have missed it.  so despite pure exhaustion, we headed back out to get a glimpse of that hong kong skyline:

 

and we had honey-glazed pork for dinner.  folks.  hong-kong style.