It’s Sunday, and today is our last full day in Hong Kong. We board an airplane tomorrow morning, which will bring us back to the good ‘ole US of A. Detroit is our port of entry, and barring any unforeseen events, Mia will become a US citizen there. We have a large brown envelope, carrying all of her citizenship documents. This envelope must arrive at immigration intact and unopened. We are guarding it like a precious jewel. To finish out our exploration of Hong Kong, we took a day trip to Lantau Island. We navigated the Hong Kong metro system relatively easily (this one wasn’t nearly as daunting as Tokyo), once we realized that the ticket machines only accepted payment in cash, and that cash had to be paid in coins. One way tickets for the four of us totaled $68 (Hong Kong dollars, not US). Do people here really have to carry that much change around if they want to use the Metro? This seemed very strange. Once we completed the 30 minute train ride to Lantau, we stood in a very long queue (the British word for line) to purchase our cable car tickets which would take us to the top of the island, and the Ngong Ping village. Hong Kong has only been back in the possession of the Chinese government since 1999, so everything here is still very British. We splurged for the glass-bottom cable car for our 25 minute ride to the top. The children loved watching the passing scenery through the floor, so the extra money was well spent. The village was cute, and very western, sporting the likes of Subway, Hagen-Daas, and of course, Starbucks. We picnicked under an umbrella covered table, before venturing towards the Tian Tan statue. This statue is the world’s tallest outdoor, seated bronze statue of the Buddha. Despite Communist rule, the predominant faith system here is Buddhism, followed by Islam in distant second. This statue of the Buddha is adjacent to the Po Lin Monastery, which is Hong Kong’s most predominant. Together, we climbed all 288 steps to the top. We did our best to respect the reverence of the monument dedicated to this great spiritual teacher, and we saw many people involved in silent, or chanting prayer.
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Lisa LynchLisa is a world traveling mom that took the ultimate adventure Archives
December 2012
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