10 Things I Will Miss About Korea

This is the start of my little series on how I feel about returning home to the UK in March.

Didn't know I was coming back?

Well, come the end of March, my mug will be paraded around the streets of Portsmouth once more. Hide your pork pies... I'm a-coming!

10 Things I Will Miss About Korea

The things I will miss about 대한민국 (South Korea... I'm just showing off) are plentiful to say the least, but I will try and think of the things I will miss most and somehow form a kind of list. It's not a 'top 10' or anything, just a list.

1. 제육덮밥 (Jae ook deopp bap (sorry for the rubbish romanisation)) - a kind of spicy pork dish. The meat is quite fatty but cut like thick bits of bacon. Drenched in a 'Korean spice' - a name I use for that spice that Koreans seem to use on everything that I haven't really bothered to remember the real name of - sauce with a fist full of rice. There's some veggies in there, but they are left in the shadow of the slices of pork. Disclaimer: Sarah's restricted me from the wonders of tasting the 제육덮밥 because it's 'bad for my health'. She's right, of course, and I can get it 'once a week', she says... She cares more about my health than I do :)
   I suppose I can throw many Korean foods under this bullet point: donkatsu (actually Japanese), the cheapness and availability of sushi (also Japanese...), bibimbap, jajangmyeon, kimbap, kalbi among other foods that I don't know the name of because I've let Sarah order for me too many times.
   
   
   
2. Home Plus... Oh wait, it's basically Tesco's... I only like it because it's literally yards from Sarah's apartment complex.
   
   In fact, that is what I will miss about Korea, more specifically, Incheon. Looking out of the window of Sarah's apartment, I can see literally everything that I need to live. There's a bakery, two bakeries, actually; a bank downstairs; restaurants, bars (western and Korean), coffee shops; dentist round the corner, doctors in the building next to hers, opticians, pharmacy; a gym... I could go on.
   Actually, the above is a bit pointless when you can get everything delivered... I don't even have to leave the apartment to get fully cooked meals on plates with cutlery, side dishes etc.
   Everything is so convenient here that we moan about having to wait a couple of minutes for the elevator. Actually, it does take a long time... it can be quite frustrating.
   
   
   
3. My students. Enough said, really. My students are awesome, well... most of them anyway :)
   
   
   
4. The internet connection. My monster internet connection has got entire HD movies downloaded in minutes. We use ethernet cables plugged into our laptops, too, which makes the transfer even quicker. When I get back to the UK it'll be like those Star Trek episodes when they go to those lame little planets with budget technology and they have to act all impressed. 'Oooo you're downloading at 1MB a second? Big whoop, bruv... had 4MB/s back in 대한민국' - will be a statement I'll have to try and avoid using in an attempt to not sound like a total jerk.
   
   
   
5. It's going to sound bad, but I'll miss being able to play the foreigner card. A great example was the time when I forgot to bring change for the shopping trolleys at Home Plus. Instead of simply cutting down on what I bought so I could carry it myself or use a basket, I made eye-contact with an employee and tugged at the chained up shopping trolleys as if I didn't understand what was happening. The employee, at a slight jog, came to my aid and unlocked them for me :) What a pro.
   
   
   
6. No.5 on my list actually touches on this item: the kindness of the Korean people. OK, they might be a bit xenophobic at times, the dirty stares etc, but that's a different story. I believe that Koreans are inherently kind and welcoming. I'm not sure if this applies to Korean-on-Korean kindness (Sarah and I have seen many a Korean vent their stress and anger upon one another), but Korean-on-foreigner kindness? Sure.
   The stories I've heard of people being invited around random people's houses for dinner seems to crop up every now and then. I seem to get 떡 (ddeok) every other day for when teachers go through some kind of hardship, like a death in the family, or have something to celebrate, like a marriage. I've had 3 packets of the stuff in the past two days and a can of some sweet rice drink, which I don't really like but I'm saving it to pawn off to some kid if I run out of candy.
   
   
   
7. How anime and manga is the popular art form. When I was a kid, I remember doodling weird shapes or stick figures hitting each other with giant swords (hello, Freud). The kids here? They're doodling anime characters or reading manga under the desk. If you want to see more of what I'm talking about then check out my blog on what I've called 'Kool Korea' here [1] and here [2]. But that anime/manga stuff is everywhere! If only I could read Korean...
   
   
   
8. The transport here is so handy... and interesting. If I want to get to Seoul I have the options of bus, subway, or taxi - all of which I can pay for with a single wave of my T-Money card. All three options are cheap, too, compared with England at least. Taxis are obviously the most expensive option, but even then I have gotten from Hongdae to my place in Incheon for about 30,000 won (20 quid) - a 30 minute journey, about 40 minutes by bus and about the same by subway, even less now the airport line is open.
   The bus I take to school is a banged up wreck that I'm surprised is even allowed on the roads to be honest. But it's my wreck. I've seen people running for the bus fall flat on their face through my position on the back seat (I sit there by choice, it's not 60s civil rights deal). I've seen car crashes, arguments, midgets, old people get elbowed in the head by people falling on them because the bus driver drives like a maniac. I found a phone on that bus and stressed out all the passengers while I tried to communicate with the owner's father when he called the phone. I used to take the bus to work all the time back in England, and the only interesting thing I remember from that was when the bus driver wouldn't let me on because he had driven 3 feet past the bus stop already...
   
   
   
9. I'll miss the places we've visited. Places like Muuido, Seoul, places in Incheon that we've visited, Busan, Gapyeong, Mokpo for the F1. Those are memories, but you still miss it. I regret not seeing some things like the Tripitaka Koreana, Jeju-do, the north Eastern region, but you can't do everything... and anyway it's a mission to get to those places :P Who knows, maybe we'll return in the future?
   
   
   
10. When you're in Korea, in this country where hardly anyone speaks your language and as a Guest English Teacher (GET) you are treated as such: a guest, you get into your own little bubble. When you're here it's difficult for anything to affect you. I look at the news and politics from America and the UK all the time, but if I didn't want to then I don't have to. I don't have to read a newspaper or watch the news, which is inevitable when you're in your home country.
    Seeing a headline or have something happen to you can make or break your day sometimes. If I get dirty looks on the subway here, or I see a bus driver literally get out of his bus just to shout at a passer-by and consequently get into a fight (happened more than once) I can just put it down to 'it's their culture. I can't help because I can't talk to them. There's literally nothing I can do, so I'm just gonna sit back and soak it up and enjoy the interesting experience'. It sounds harsh and non-conflict but it's true. If a Korean is looking at me strangely, what am I really going to say to them? What can I say? If it was in England, I'd have to deal with it. I'd be like 'erm, can I help you?' and then take it from there. Here my tactic is to stare back at them until they feel awkward and look away.
    Tip: old guys don't usually feel awkward like this and it will take a lot of staring before they look away...
    Obviously when things happen to your family at home or when you miss a birthday or Christmas, it has an affect, but that's what you've signed up for. There's nothing you can do but feel that way. But I'm talking about having to deal with rubbish on a day-to-day basis, not the far-reaching effects of missing family events.
    Although isolation can be draining sometimes, I will miss not having to deal with the rubbish you get thrown at you on a daily basis at home. From little things to the big, in your 'Korean bubble' it's often your choice what you can let into your life. (Unfortunately, Sarah, as a 교포 (gyopo - a person of Korean descent who was born and/or raised outside of Korea itself, e.g. Korean-American), does not have this luxury. She speaks enough Korean to know when people are saying things.)

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Sports day preliminaries

Turned up to class today (class 2-5) to find no bugger there and a load of kids shouting at me to go outside and watch the football. This took a while for them to get across because I initially thought that they were winding me up and their English was shocking. I also thought I might've got prior warning that I got to watch football instead of trawl through the textbook with the kids, but this is Korea after all and I've gotten used to it :P

Here's a few pictures I shoddily took of the game:

The kids, and even one of my co-teachers who was sitting next to me, were well keen about the game. My co-teacher kept like slapping me on the back when things happened, cheering really loudly... It was the Final of the group to see who progresses into next weeks Sports Day. Serious stuff.

The game ended in a goalless draw with penalties to come and it was pretty tense, as you can see by all the nail biting going on in the picture above :P

This is our glorious playing field. Almost as dusty as my apartment :P

The game ended 5-4 on penalties with class 2-5 (the team I was cheering on) beating class 2-3.

If this was tense, imagine next weeks Sports Day...

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Cool Korea: Update

I haven't seen the show, but for all you One Piece fans out there (Sarah and Tea Leaf..) here is a particularly time consuming piece of graffiti that I found on one of my students desks:

I asked the girl sitting behind it if she had done it and she sort of nodded sheepishly in that kind of 'I'm gonna be honest in the hope that my honesty saves me from punishment' way. Then I asked her if I could take a photo and her face beamed :)

One of these days I might get around to teaching...

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Cool Korea, Part Three: Stargate and Gorillas

I found the extra pictures that I was going to use for this blog, so here I am writing it as the class I was supposed to teach got cancelled because of Sports Day preliminaries.

Starting off with a mug. No, it's not a picture of myself... It's a mug that I was given in a restaurant months ago that I thought was, and still is, hilarious. I took 4 pictures of the mug from different angles.. Can you spot the odd one out?

They aren't hiring thousands of native English teachers for nothing you know... I wouldn't be surprised if this mug was designed by a native English guy for his own amusement actually.

Coolness rating: 8/10 - I cracked up.

Koreans love their manga (Japanese comic books). I took this photo in a manga rental shop (that also hired out some DVDs). Here they didn't just have the standard shelving to house their massive collection, oh no, they had two extra layers of shelving behind the normal shelves that you could slide away to get to the hidden manga behind it.

Also, it's mostly quiet at lunchtime here at Myeonghyun middle school because there are about 200 kids in the library reading manga... To be honest, I'd be reading it too if it wasn't all in Korean :'(

Coolness rating: 9/10 - there's nothing uncool about a shop full of manga :P

In Korea there are many frilly little, girly places dotted around that you stroll into when your on a date and have some cake, papingsu, and/or coffee. They are essentially desert places where you sit in relative comfort in your own little booth and have a chat with your woman about whatever over desert. This is one we went to in Bucheon. It was larger than most we've been to, looked as girly as ever, cheesecake was nice... Wait a minute... is that a f-ing Stargate?

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Yes. Yes, it was a Stargate. I was sitting there eating cheesecake and sipping at coffee for 20 minutes without realising this pansy-ass place had a bloody Stargate as the entrance. The glass door was even frosted to make it look like the event horizon... I don't know why or how, but it's there.

Coolness rating: 10/10 - Bit of Stargate while I'm having a cheeky coffee never hurts :P

This is my desk at work. I'd like to say that it isn't usually this messy but that would be lying (as I'm writing this blog I have a half eaten ddeok just sitting there in it's packet sitting on top of a pile of lesson plans, my headphones strewn across the desk, and an old newpaper from last week...). Anyway, this picture shows how much they've been plugging Starcraft II over here. I've seen ads everywhere from the side of Lotteria (the Korean equivalent of McDonalds) drinks cups (pictured) to on the side of buses. I've been suckered in and bought the game.. I'm really bad at it :/

Coolness rating: 6/10 - Everytime I ask a student what he did on the weekend 9/10 times the conversation goes like this:

Lee: What did you do on the weekend?

Student: Computer game.

Lee: Which computer game did you play?

Student: Starcraft? (In that 'you probably don't know what game I'm talking about' kind of way)

Lee: Of course you did.

It's starting to get annoying.

Finally, here is a picture of a drunk/crazy guy on the subway. Notice no one is helping him or even looking at him (except us, of course). He was staggering around trying to sit down next to that poor girl in pink but kept falling over. He was shouting at people and ended up emptying out most of carriage :P

Coolness rating: 7/10 - I see it all too often...

And that concludes my lame little series on what I've called 'Cool Korea' :)

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Cool Korea, Part Two: Student Stuff

Figured out how to transfer pictures. It was slightly tedious :/

Part two of my little series on what I've called 'Cool Korea' (I've tried to make it sound professional but is basically whatever pictures I found on my camera phone that I deemed to be 'cool') is on things that my students have done and mostly centers around graffiti... :P

Most of the graffiti I saw in my school in England seemed to focus around three things: someone is in love with someone else '4eva', anything to do with Pompey FC, and, last but not least, the standard drawings of a mans privates... Although I have found the same stuff in Korea (minus the stuff about Pompey, unfortunately :'( ) I also discover mini works of art that I assume could only have been drawn in my classes as I think they like maths and science too much to bother in those..

In a first grade class I found these anime drawings on some kids desk. Didn't tell him off because I was impressed... bad teaching, sure, but I don't want to be the guy who takes the paintbrush from Da Vinci :/ To be honest, I've found better graffiti, but I thought it was cool :)

An improved version from what must be the same kid sitting at a different desk. Looks like he's almost perfected it. Also, is this a Pokemon or a Digimon?

Now this is a work of art. Different uses of colour, shading, and it's pretty creative... This must've taken a good hour at least to do, so definitely drawn in my class then... My favourite by far.

Coolness rating: 9/10 - if your gonna graffiti, you might as well draw a Digimon or a flying fish :P

By the way, I see plenty more stuff drawn on kids' desks (mostly anime) but I'm not keen enough to snap all of em - the students thought I was weird even taking photos of the Pokemon.

Guess the art teacher got the students to make papier-mache masks because the office was littered with em. This kid clearly done the best job though... Ichigo ftw :P

Coolness rating: 6/10 - Haven't seen Bleach in a while..

Drawing of a beaver I quickly scrawled on the board to show them that a beaver is not the same as a squirrel... Everyone was cracking up :'(

Coolness rating: 1/10 - although professionally drawn, accurate and almost unidentifiable from an actual photograph of a beaver, it's shit.

Finally, graffiti my co-teacher showed me on the wall by the stairs leading to the first grade. It means 'native teacher is the best' :)

Coolness rating: 10/10 - love how students risked being punished to declare that I'm the best :P although I don't condone it... much ;)

Part three coming up sometime next week :o

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Cool Korea

I've been here around 8 months now and so I think it's about time I showed you some cool pictures I've taken since my arrival. Ok, they're not the most professional photos (they're semi-pro at best) but I think they're pretty cool anyway :P

During my time in America, and the two hours I spent watching 'Bowling for Columbine', I learnt that you can buy a gun and ammunition in Walmart, just a few aisles down from the kiddy bikes. The Korean equivalent is that they sell martial arts equipment in Home Plus right next to the board games. It's not quite as mental as selling things that might later be kept as evidence from some kind of shopping mall killing spree, but I'd say it's cooler. I wasn't even remotely shocked to find that they were running low on aluminium nunchucks in my local Home Plus.. I just thought it was pretty cool. Anyway, this is training gear, but it still could cause some damage, and I bet there is plenty a chav in the UK who would give up his last bottle of Stella for a chance to wield that solid steel baton in the centre of the picture around the streets of Portsmouth :P

Coolness rating: 8/10

Cool thing I saw near Sarah's place in Nonhyeon-dong: A 'robot' with a movement sensor of some kind bowed at you and said something in Korean. I think it was on a cycle of 'Anyong haseyo!' and then said something about a phone deal :S

Coolness rating: 9/10 (Sarah didn't really like it but I loved it :P)

Anime is so big in Korea that they even use it on the front cover of the Twilight books :P

Here is Edward and Bella looking particularly emo on the front of 'Eclipse'. It looks like Edward is doing that thing where you hold your hands together and blow into em to make the sound of an owl hooting :o

Coolness rating: 6/10 (it's pretty cool, but doesn't reach the dizzy heights of nunchaku and training swords)
Kids having a Pokemon battle, again, in Home Plus, apparently the home of coolness. The guy in the gray hat on the right was well keen and definitely over 18. I had a closer look and he was playing a kid of around 7 or 8 with cards that were in little plastic sleeves as if they were valuable :P

Coolness rating: 4/10 (would've been higher if the keeno hadn't shown up)

Part two coming up whenever I figure out how to transfer photos from my phones internal memory to my micro SD card..

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Casper the Kitten

As requested, a blog about Sarah and I's cat, Casper.

A few things before we start. Casper is roughly 3 months old (I can't remember his exact birth date... Sarah knows. I'm not good with dates. Probably should have chose something other than History to study then really).

He is a boy ;) His testicles are starting to drop so, according to Sarah, we've got to get him neutered in the next few months otherwise he'll pee everywhere, marking his territory.

He likes to bite and scratch but he does it in a playful way and is rarely ever aggressive, if at all. I actually like it when he bites on my finger because his face is so serious when he does it and it cracks me up. His biting doesn't hurt me about 99% of the time but it hurts Sarah so we are conditioning him with a spray bottle. We're getting to the point that we only have to show him that we are wielding the spray bottle and he gets all submissive and bottles it.

This is Casper when we first got him about 5 weeks ago. Probably the cutest picture of him.

This is him wandering the apartment. You can see his litter tray in the background. I need to get one with a dome-like lid because he leaps in and out of this litter tray and gets litter everywhere :/ It's clogging up the vacuum cleaner.

Another cute picture of Casper looking all innocent.

This is Casper nowadays. As you can see he is getting larger now, which means he can jump higher... This is him eyeing up the amazing pancakes on my desk with a peach maple sauce that Sarah made. It was an amazing breakfast. No wonder Casper wanted a bit (he got none ;) ).

(You can also see my new laptop glistening just next to him :P Macbook Pro, innit).

Casper sitting on the towel that Sarah turned blue in the wash. I put the towel under his litter tray to hold some of the litter he tosses everywhere. It doesn't really do the job :/

Casper has really blue eyes, which is one of the reasons why we fell in love with him from the get go.

An 'I-Can-Has-Cheezburger'-esque picture. In fact, this picture cracked me up so much I went all keen and made an 'I-Can-Has-Cheezburger' pic of it :P

Keen eh?

Some info on getting a cat in Korea. Everywhere I've looked they are more expensive than dogs. With the litter tray, food, I think his first bout of injections, and some toys to start with it cost around 500,000 won, which is about $500 or 300 GBP. I put this down to the type of people in Korea who buy pets: women who want something cute and cuddly to carry in their handbag, which you cannot do with a cat so they are not in as much demand. It's not a sexist stereotype, I see it everyday (remember the fire alarm blog with the woman carrying her tiny dog in her arms?).

Also, bringing him into the EU will be a nightmare. And it's not bright and dandy when taking him to the U.S. either. South Korea isn't on the EU's 'listed' country list for being able to bring pets into the region. If he does enter the UK he will have to spend 6 months in quarantine, which we don't want to happen. So the plan is we take him to the U.S., where apparently he will only have to spend 3 months in quarantine, and then hold onto to him in America for 6 months from the time his blood is tested - we have to do this otherwise he cannot come to the UK without the 6 month quarantine as he hasn't spent enough time in a 'listed' country prior to entering the EU. Then we have to get him a Pet Passport, and proof that he has had the correct shots.

Imagine having this bureaucracy 100 or even 50 years ago... wouldn't have happened. It's a headache, but, as Sarah keeps saying, we don't have to worry about it for a year :D!

Didn't mean to end on a downer, but he's an awesome cat, not boring, very active (a bit too active at times) and he's loyal (he follows us around the apartment and runs to the door when we come in :) ). I think me and Sarah have done well :)

update:

just made another one...

Oh I almost forgot. Here are some videos I took of Casper. Yes, I get bored in my apartment a lot:

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Typhoon Kompasu

So Typhoon Kompasu (Japanese for 'compass' - basically 'compass' said in a Japanese accent) hit Korea Thursday morning. I had an afterschool class the previous day and I was asking the students when it will hit and they were all like 'oh, it's supposed to hit tomorrow afternoon'. They were wrong of course because we were woken up at 6 by the howling of winds and battering of rain on the window. We done well not to wake up sooner as all of my friends and co-workers seemed to get woken up at 4 or some other earlier time than us. The teacher who sits next to me in the office (don't know her name... apparently it takes more than 6 months to remember the names of people in Korea) had all the windows in her house smashed out by Kompasu. All the problems I experienced was having to dodge minor debris in the street and an unlit candle falling off the windowsill as the window was slightly open because Casper was starting to stink up the room (did you know cat's can fart? I didn't..). Well here are a couple of pictures of the debris in my 'hood:

This is at the bus stop I take to school everyday. This structure used to be a disused newspaper stand but it had been ripped from it's bolted position in the ground and blown into the road with the other debris.
A day later and some of the trees that had been damaged by Kompasu had been piled up by someone.

School started at 10:10 instead of the usual time of 8:40 because of the typhoon. I thought 'Great, that means I don't have to teach a couple of classes today'. Wishful thinking because rather than just cancel the class they just extended the school day... Imagine that in England? Finishing school and hour and a half later because the schedule had been changed. Wouldn't happen.

My mate Tony has some better pictures of our neighbourhood after the typhoon. I was kind of reading 'The Lost Symbol' on the bus that day and didn't think to take a look around and I missed a lot of the damage :/ Oh well, apparently there is another Typhoon coming next week so second time lucky :)

http://tleeinkorea.blogspot.com/2010/09/typhoon.html - this is Tony's blog where you can see some more pictures.

And here is some information on Kompasu on various websites that I just found after googling 'Typhoon Kompasu':

Satellite image of Kompasu (same as the one at the start of the blog): http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=45603

CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/09/02/typhoon-south-korea.html

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Summer Vacation: Part Two - Hong Kong

It was a shorter trip than I thought from Manila to Hong Kong. And when we turned up at Hong Kong Airport it was like going forward in time. Not literally though (Hong Kong and Philippines are in the same time zone I believe) but compared to the budget airport in Puerto Princesa with all the third world-esque trimmings - the dirt roads, the oh so many insects - it felt like what the 21st century should look feel like. So, we rolled into the airport and I have HSBC bank staring at me waiting to give my debit card a big hug. And so it did :P (Dad: It reminded me of the scene in National Lampoon's Vegas Vacation when Clark Griswald goes to the ATM and gets a ton of money out with an excited grin on his face like he's just won the lottery :P)

So, the big guns were out and I was ready for Hong Kong.

Hong Kong

First port of call was the hotel. Now I use the word 'hotel' very generously here because what we stayed in was actually some scummy guest-house that let no light in and had warm (lukewarm) water. It let so little light in that we woke up to what felt like 5am but we couldn't get back to sleep for some reason so we checked the time on Beth's iPod and found that it was 10:30am... :( Budget. It was near some place called Chung King Mansions, which apparently is a little bit famous. Overall though it was only a place to sleep in between hitting up Hong Kong.

So, after getting our stuff sorted in the guest-house we went for a bit of a wander. Beth said something about a ferry to Hong Kong island so we jumped in a taxi 'cause we didn't know where it was :S We rolled up to the ferry terminal and I don't think I'll ever forget the view that hit me. I just didn't expect it.

This is me in front of the most amazing skyline I've ever seen. My camera doesn't really do it justice :/

These are the two towers in 'Batman: The Dark Knight' that I didn't realise was in Hong Kong until someone said. We tried to go up to the top of them but they're actually proper finance towers where people actually work so we just had a beer at a smaller rooftop about a third of the way down. Amazingly, I saw my friend Kara at the bar here just chilling out so it was nice to catch up with her... Unplanned meeting too. So random. But things like that always seem to happen to me.. saw my mate Andrew at Namsan tower randomly a couple of months back, but that doesn't compare to this chance meeting halfway around the world in Hong Kong at some random bar.

Anyway, this is me eating 'beefy balls' at a place Lonely Planet recommended:

It took a while to find because it was stuck in some warehouse looking thing which turned out to be a market where they seemed to sell only raw meat, other various food, and this stuff. It was like a sweat box in there but it was cheap, and actually pretty filling and tasty. Good fun.

Later that day we took the ferry over to Hong Kong island again and then took what was described by Lonely Planet as a 'short taxi ride' to Stanley Market. 30-odd minutes later and we were there :P It was a pretty cool place. They had plenty of souvenir stands, pubs, and this pretty nice view you can see from the above picture.

Victoria Peak

Victoria Peak is THE view of Hong Kong. The viewing platform structure appears on the back of the 20 HK dollar bill and it's jam packed with tourists. Basically the place to visit in Hong Kong. Shame it was a smoggy day :/

Oh wait. It cleared up at night.

The view was spectacular. Like you can see, we initially went up to the viewing platform during the day but figured that it would be better at night. So we had dinner at some awesome Chinese restaurant to pass the time and fill our bellies. But during the dinner the storm started. And when I say storm, I mean thunderstorm. And when I say thunderstorm, I mean the worst storm I have ever seen. We were so high up that we were actually in a cloud for most of it so we could only see flashes when there was lightning. It was actually a little scary. I mean I didn't wet my pants but it was a little unnerving because we were so high up. The rain cleared but the storm continued and here were the results (it gets good around 27 seconds so don't give up on it):

It was like this for ages but I only managed to capture this little bit of it on film for some reason. My skillz are letting me down :/

Avenue of the Stars

Next day we went to the 'Avenue of the Stars' (Chinese/Hong Kong stars). Here are some pictures:

The master... and Bruce Lee :O

Think my hand was roughly the same size as Jackie Chan's.

Me and the Hong Kong skyline.

Other general Hong Kong stuff

After all this we went to Hong Kong Park. It was surprisingly beautiful for something that looked like it was dumped in the middle of the city. It had an awesome aviary where we saw plenty of tropical birds; some weird, some just pigeons. They also had a load of Koi and some terrapins that were basking in the sun. This is me at the park:

There was a Tai Chi garden in the park in which they had a tower with 151 steps (I think) and this was the view from it. It was humid. We were knackered.

This is my dessert at the place we ate at in the park. Again, you can reach me at leeisprophotographer@bigtime.com

Me sitting at an awesome side street restaurant that had great food at a pittance. Not sure how clean the kitchen was and the bathroom was worse than the one in Trainspotting but I loved it.

Giant Buddha... almost forgot to write about this

On our last proper day in Hong Kong we decided not to go to some random waterpark and instead to hit up the 'largest seated Buddha in the world'. It sounds a bit of a farce like 'the world's largest cat fed only on salmon' or 'the world's smallest boat with two fridges'.. but that aside, it was an awesome sight to behold. We could either walk it, coach it, or take the cable car up to it. Seeing as we didn't know anything about the coach and the walk would've taken about 15 hours in the blistering heat, we decided to take the cable car up and enjoy the view. 45 minutes in the non-air conditioned queue later and we were up and enjoying the scenery:

The cable cars we went in. Here you can see the Buddha in the distance and part of the path you can take if your mental enough to want to walk there.

Me with Giant Buddha. I felt slightly bad taking pictures like this because there were actual Buddhists praying around me and there's me eating an ice cream and acting like an inconsiderate tourist :P

World's largest seated Buddha.
Me with a general that is supposed to represent my Zodiac sign, the rabbit.

Well that's pretty much it. Roll on Chuseok!

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