Hong Kong and China wrap up

For the last 5 days we have been in Hong Kong!  We are staying with our good friend Debbie (Lyons Ellis... not me :)'s brother and his family which has been a lovely change of pace.  It is always nice to have people to give you advice and show you where the locals hang out. We've been taking it a little easy, getting ready to head to South East Asia tomorrow (via Bangkok) to meet up with our friend John!! Yay guest!  We love guests.  Everyone should keep that in mind.

While we've been here we have managed to do some fun stuff in between all of our relaxing. Yesterday we took an amazing gondola ride out to the Big Buddha on Lantau Island. It's supposedly the 'largest outdoor bronze buddha in the world' which is a lot of qualifiers but it is big, majestic and beautiful.

We also spent a day out at the 10,000 Buddha Temple, which is super fun (see pics) with golden monk/buddhas lining the sides, and temples at the top with toooons of buddhas, and one big one and one mummified monk covered in gold gilt...
Today we went to the Hong Kong History Museum, which was really great to give us good context for Hong Kong, and it's place in this part of Asia.  The most interesting parts for me were understanding how little of Hong Kong exsisted when the UK took possession of it.  What we really think of as Hong Kong, was really built as a British colony.

Also fun? The longest escalator in the world (although non-contiguous) is a series of escalators here which are about 800 meters long!  Hong Kong is built into a hill, so downtown is at the bottom and people mostly live built into the hill. Steve and Erica live at the top, so every night we get to ride it all the way up! (Even funnier.. it runs down hill from 6-10 am for commuters, then uphill from 10:20-midnight... don't you wish you could say that you commute by escalator?)

We also spent a night out on Lan Kwai Fong... which is essentially the restaurant/bar area of any college town on steriods, it's where all the westerners hang... best burger I've had in Asia though!  It was a really fun night.

All told, it's been a great time, and we are super excited for our South East Asian unplanned extravaganza!