“Happy New Year!” and “Copy watch?” is what you hear a lot in the streets of Hong Kong. A day before we arrived the festivities for the new Chinese new year had ended and everything is back to normal now. Several times a day some guys in the street ask us “copy watch?” if we want to buy a fake brand watch.

The last 3 days we have seen and done a lot in Hong Kong. After a long night flight where we hardly slept a minute, we arrived early in the morning. Our hotel room wasn't ready yet, so we went discovering the city immediately, trying to stay awake. We stayed in the YMCA hotel in Kowloon, which is perfecty located with views over Victoria Harbour and good rooms.

It turns out we didn't really enjoy those views from our room, because we were mostly out in the city or asleep. We like Hong Kong the most at night, when the millions of lights are on and the buildings look much prettier than during the day.
Yesterday (Tuesday) we went to Lantau, one of the islands next to HK. There we visited the Po Lin monastery with the Big Buddha. It's the biggest Buddha made of bronze in the world, and it's huge! Next to the temple, people burn incense (wierook) and say little prayers for good luck in this Year of the Rat. There is so much incense burned that the whole place is in smoke and your eyes start to water. They also put fruit and vegetables as offers to the Gods, even though fruits are extremely expensive here (5 Euro for 1 apple!). Than we saw other people praying and taking some of the vegetables home...we haven't understood yet what the logic behind this is. This happened at all temples that we visited so far,

Today we have a lazy day and fly to Kathmandu, Nepal, this evening. The text that I'm writing now, is written on our new gadget: a very small laptop (EeePC). It's as big and lightweight as a normal size book, so easy to take with us. This way we can sit in the sun, on a terrace, and write texts, surf the web and edit pictures! Electronics and cameras are slightly cheaper and widely available here. We have never seen so many people with Nikons and Canons around their necks before! Not only do they all wear cameras and telephones, also scarves, hats and mittens, because it's winter. To HK standards, it's very cold now, and it's the longest period of coldness in 20 years. What the temperature is? It's 12 degrees Celcius, with a fresh wind. So we don't think it's that cold, but the Chinese are all dressed in thick downjackets (mostly The North Face, as everything is branded here). Life in general is cheap here. We took the ferry from Kowloon to HK each day for 0,20 Euro p.p. and our fine dinner last night was only 7,5 Euro for the two of us. We hope Nepal is even cheaper!

Hong Kong was fun, the (amounts of) people amazing and the lights beautiful.
The next days we'll be in Kathmandu, finding out if we can do the trekking to the basecamp of Mount Everest!