Today ended up being very eventful... We started the morning off by jumping on tour buses that took us to Lantau Island where we rode cable cars on the longest cable in all of Asia. The cable car took us to a little town at the top of a mountain that is home to the largest Buddha in the world, the thing was 31 metres tall! After getting out of the cable cars we took over 230 steps to the very top where we could get up close and personal with the buddha himself. We then creeped around the touristy street of shops where a bunch of us located a starbucks, jackpot! It's amazing the tiny things that get us excited over here, a frappucino never looked so good! Our visit to the buddha was followed by a vegetarian chinese lunch served in a monestary. I excused myself to the washroom so that I could take my shot before I ate, much to my surprise, when I finally located the bathroom, it was comprised of a metal seat in the ground; needless to say, I opted for an empty bench out back of the restaurant instead lol. So back to this vegetarian lunch, I honestly could not even tell you what it was besides green tea, rice, some large springrolls, and some vegetables, everything else was unidentifiable. There was some dish made of "taro", people said it tasted similar to mashed potatoes, but I thought it looked like a strange looking light purple blob..
After our trip to Lantau island, we visited a small fishing village where we got to explore, as well as go on a little boat to the ocean to look for dolphins. The village was like nothing you've ever seen before; shanties everywhere, where the front part of the house served as a store in the street market. There was dried seafood EVERYWHERE, and the streets reeked of fish. In the middle of this poor village we found a store that sold cans of beer for about 1$, clearly we had to take advntage of that lol. After looking around for a while it was our turn for the little tour boat, not only did we get a glimps of a "pink" dolphin, as well as a blue one, but we also got the luxury of witnessing someone taking care of business in an outhouse. You might ask how we managed to see this... We actually just saw the "business" dropping from the outhouse directly into the water we were boating along... Lovely.
We ended the tour by checking out a couple of big bridges in the city, not very interesting if you ask me; but we had some engineering students on the tour, so maybe it was for their sake, who knows. After we returned from the tour a bunch of us got ready and decided to go to the racetrack for the night. I took the MTR (subway) for the first time, it's amazing how easy it is to get around on that thing! It took us a while, but we finally got into the racetrack, it was amazing, not to mention huge, and in the middle of the city! I bet on 4 races and won nothinggggg, bothered. Most of us bet $10HK on each race, which works out to be just over 1$CAD, so we really didn't lose much.
It's funny how open all of the exchange students are to just asking people for their phone numbers. Everyone just wants to keep in contact and get as many friends as they can, it's really funny, but also super awesome since everybody is doing the same thing. Not bragging or anything but I already have 14 new friends in my chinese phone, nbd. our tour tomorrow isn't until 2:15, so I'm looking forward to a nice long sleep, I was thinking of going to check out the gym in the morning; but who am I kidding, probably not haha.
stay classy sandiego, until next time =)
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