Christmas Eve in Hong Kong

Before we all got in the car to head to Hong Kong city we had breakfast in the little counter service place in our hotel.  My dad had some orange juice.  Exhibit A:

That is in fact Minute Maid Orange juice, right?  Now check out the ingredients:

"(Contains fish product)"  What the hell?   There is absolutely no reason orange juice should contain "fish product".  And what is "Fish product" anyway? SERIOUSLY WTF CHINA

We are staying at the Kowloon Shangri-La.  It's kinda crazy super nice as you can see from the lobby above.

They really like curved walls in hotel rooms I guess.

Stupidly huge bathroom.   The shower is like it's own room it's so stupidly huge.

Our view of Hong Kong Island.   Hong Kong is a city that is divided onto several little islands and the Kowloon Peninsula (where we are staying).  The actual Hong Kong Island has the Central area, think Times Square.

This weird ball sculpture thing was on the table by the window.  We totally thought it was a metal sculpture until my dad poked it and discovered it is actually a chocolate sculpture.  Oh, and we broke it open to discover it was filled with chocolate truffles.  Yep.

The subway system here is really really awesome.   There are pedways under there street where you can walk underground to get places or walk underground to get to a specific subway line.   In these pedways there are 711s, Circle Ks and and many other convenience stores.  There are even bakeries!

Super cute Angry Birds cake!  

The MTR is crazy awesome.  To buy a single ride ticket they have these little machines.  You poke the stop you are going to on the machine and it pops up and tells you the price to get there.  How nice is that?  We are using Octopus cards, which is a plastic card that has money loaded onto it so you don't have to worry about buying a ticket every time.  

When we emerged from the very crowded subway this is what we saw.  Madness.   I directed us to the CTMA Center which has a Toymart floor.  The malls here are completely nuts.  I'm an idiot and haven't taken a picture that accurately depicts how crazy these places are yet.   It's like a never ending sea of closet sized shops.   So tiny that my family can't actually all fit in there at once.   I'll get a good picture later, I promise.

We went to Superman Toys.  Which is a pretty large toyshop that is well known by fellow nerd toy collectors like me on the internet.  This is why:

OMG stuff.  So much of it.  Wow.  And this isn't even the store, this is just their display window.   Liv and I got some cool things, like a tofu chopsticks practice game and some little silly plastic figures (including a Super Toast Man).  

A lot of the shops in theses malls have terrible English names because they are trying to be cool.  I liked this one:

Hipster Men's Fashion.  This might go over well if they put one on Wabash near Columbia.   

I was looking at some sweaters in this one little fashion boutique when my mother pointed out that this was right next to me:

This cat was so chill and calm about me being in the shop I didn't even notice it was there!   Also it's wearing a dress O_o

So overall we had a great time in Mong Kok (shopping area we were in).  It was awesome and not touristy because it is where the locals go shopping.  We will probably be headed back later in the week.  

Then we got on the subway back to Tsim Sha Tsui East (where our hotel is located).  Holy crap.  We thought it was crowded before?  We were wrong.   So very wrong.  

We got of the train and tried to walk towards the pedway area that would take us back to our hotel.  Nope.  There was a lady in a yellow shirt telling us we could not do just that.  We were ushered in the opposite direction and popped out of the Tsim Sha Tsui station.  There is a difference of several blocks between Tsim Sha Tsui East and just regular Tsim Sha Tsui and we had no idea how to get back to the hotel.  Also apparently Christmas Eve is kinda a big deal here.  Like such a big deal that they shut down ALL OF THE ROADS in Tsim Sha Tsui so we couldn't even get in a taxi because this is what the road looked like:

THOSE ARE PEOPLE NOT CARS. 

So we ended up having to ask several police man where the heck our hotel was from here and we went the wrong direction once but eventually got back to the hotel safe and sound.  

Lesson Learned: When you hear announcements in the subway saying "Due to the special event please do not try to meet your friends in the subway, and only use Octopus Cards for travel"  maybe we should have thought more about that being weird before we were trapped in a sea of millions of people.