Lily and I had some free time on Saturday. She thought it would be a good idea to go to some of the parks I don't get out to very often. When you take your daily walks in the same place all the time, it gets tedious. Hong Kong has more than enough parks to keep it interesting. Most of them require spending time on the MTR.
We went to the Hung Hom Promenade in the morning. That is a neighborhood I rarely go to, and the small promenade has nice views of Kowloon Bay and the East Harbour rather than the usual Wan Chai and Tsim Sha Tsui. There is some construction around one of the hotels right now, blocking a few paths to get to the promenade, but the promenade itself is unscathed.
You can easily see the new cruise terminal at the old airport from the promenade. Something I discovered about my phone is that the pictures look terrible when you zoom.
We took the MTR from Whampoa to Lok Fu, which is six or seven stops. The green light shows where we are, between the second and third stop. The red lights show where the train goes. The white lights show the interchange to the Tsuen Wan line and the fastest way to get from Whampoa to Central. It's all very simple and informative. I don't know why people think it is confusing.
A great thing about the Kwun Tong line is that it's not nearly as crowded as some of the others. There would be a dozen heads in this picture if it were the Tsuen Wan, Tung Chung, West, East or Island lines.
It's an easy walk from the Lok Fu station to the Kowloon Walled City Park, which does not look like this anymore.
From exit A, turn right and make a left on Junction Road. That is where the street ends, so you can't miss it. Walk down Junction Road for a few minutes until you see a playground. Either keep going until you see the entrance on the left or turn left at the playground, Tung Tau Tsuen Road, to one of the entrances on the right.
The signs in the station tell you to take exit B to go to the Walled City Park. If you follow those signs, you will go to the bus stop, which is fine if you want to take the bus. Walking out of the station from the bus stop is complicated if you don't know the area. Exit A is signed and simple.
The Walled City mostly looks like this now, which I think is a vast improvement.
Two stops from Lok Fu is Diamond Hill. Right next to the station is the Nan Lian Garden and Chi Lin Nunnery. Both are open to the public, free and beautiful places to pretend you are not surrounded by a city of 7 million people.
This is a working temple, so there are rules and restrictions, but Buddhists tend to be pretty forgiving. Unless you eat in front of one of the Buddha statues. They don't like that.
Chi Lin and Nan Lian are a small bridge apart. The garden also has rules, mostly about not feeding the fish. They don't even want you to have a snack near the pond, which is understandable. I'm sure people feed the fish all kinds of poisonous crap.
The Pavilion of Absolute Perfection has kind of an arrogant name, and is too gold for my tastes, but it looks nice in the middle of all that green.
I think this might be the first video I have ever taken with this camera. Taking pictures with a phone is strange enough. Taking video phone videos is too science fiction for me.
Kwun Tong is close to the cruise terminal and a few quick stops from Diamond Hill. It is also an authentically Hong Kong neighborhood. When I took this picture, a few people stared at me and then stared at the street below the walkway, probably wondering what on earth I was looking at.
We went back to Hung Hom for dinner. Food is everywhere in Hong Kong, but the Whampoa shopping area is ridiculous. If you ate at a different restaurant for every meal, it would take years to make your way through it all.
Above all the restaurants and shopping malls are thousands of apartments, instead of the usual office buildings and more shopping. The shopping malls are mostly underground.
Some apartments are nicer than others.
We had dinner near one of the last phone booths in the city. There are probably others somewhere, but I can't think of any. Why would anyone use a phone booth in this day and age? For the Wi-Fi, of course.
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