China Day Eleven - Kowloon / Hong Kong

(signs for "Elf Lubricants" outside a Kowloon mechanic's garage...for those elves who are perpetually on Santa's "Naughty List")

Our tenth day in China began with meeting a handful of vendors in downtown Kowloon. After work, we walked around and grabbed some lunch. Here, Sam, Missy and some Indian dude waited to cross a busy intersection:













After returning to the hotel and freshening up, Missy and I decided to catch a cab to the ferry station, and then catch a ferry ride across VICTORIA HARBOUR to CENTRAL, the heart of Hong Kong proper. On the ride there, I decided that I wanted to start decorating the dashboard of my car like a Hong Kong taxi:







At the pier, there were a lot of little shops and restaurants. I was happy to find out that the band XTC had opened up a chain of gelato stands:











We boarded the STAR FERRY which has been shuttling people back and forth across Victoria Harbour for over 100 years:









Of course, riding on the Star Ferry was just as spectacular, romantic, and nostalgic as one might expect, and, as I've said so many times before, the photos fall way short of truly capturing the experience:























We disembarked at the CENTRAL PIER and took the pedestrian bridge over to the massive and ultra-modern IFC BUILDING, which is a complex of shopping malls, restaurants, banks, train station, and offices. The IFC complex boasts the tallest skyscraper in Hong Kong, the sixth tallest in the world. The pedestrian bridge had some pretty interesting views of the Hong Kong skyline along with the harbour reclamation project :





A view of the Central Pier from the pedestrian bridge:



A view of construction crews filling in parts of the harbor for future building developments:





A fleet of double-decker buses ready to transport travelers all over the island:









On the side of one building we saw what looked to be a monumental billboard of a CALVIN KLEIN MODEL in his tighty whiteys. It was shrouded in some sort of green material, as if the local government was trying to censor it:









From the IFC Center, we hailed another red taxi cab to take us to the beach resort town of STANLEY, which was on the other side of the island: