Today’s Amusements

Involved an amusement park: Hong Kong Disneyland. (The park is located about thirty minutes by train [complete with mouse-shaped windows] from central Hong Kong).Eric has a friend from high school who works there, and she was able to snag us some tickets. Eric’s friend was transferred from the Anaheim Disneyland. Her job: princess. The type of princess varies, depending on the day. Today she was Cinderella.We also rode the rides (of course!). We rode almost every ride in the park, and we waited only in one line for about 10 minutes. There were some rides that I’d never been on, like the Winnie the Pooh one and the Buzz Lightyear one, and then there were the old standards, like Space Mountain and the carousel. This park doesn’t have a Matterhorn or a Thunder Mountain, though.The park is much, much smaller than the Anaheim one. However, even though it is smaller (and thus we did the whole park in about 4 hours), we still left the park with that dazed/confused/exhausted feeling that one gets from the “real” Disneyland in California.

Our second amusement involved a free ride (arranged by the tourist bureau) on a traditional junk boat, the Duk Ling. At first, we thought it was this boat:But then it turned out to be this:

The cruise lasted about an hour and stayed all within Victoria Harbor.A big thanks to Jen Em, who mentioned that some of her friends had done this when they were in Hong Kong.

Last, after a very yummy Chinese dinner, we saw a light show. Every night at 8pm, the skyscrapers light up with colored lights, flash, and shine laser beams across the harbor for a choreographed 12-minute show. There is even music that accompanies this, but we didn’t have a radio, and so couldn’t hear the music. The show was pretty neat all the same – especially because Hong Kong (the city) is composed almost entirely of skyscrapers, so almost all the buildings that fronted on the water were involved in the show. Here's a shot of a portion [really, just a little, little bit] of the harbor and the skyline at night (although not during said light show):