HK Day 3/Day 4: Kowloon

Humidity! Ahh! These last few days we spent in the Kowloon side of Hong Kong (we're staying on the HK Island side).  We did a lot of random stuff including visiting my dad's old school & old house, eating tons of street food, and tons of shopping in markets and malls.  Here are some random highlights!

Transit
HK has THE best transit system ever!  SO much better than the TTC!  It's clean, fast, cheap, air conditioned, it has internet and phone service (as well as internet stations where you can go on the computers for free if you need to look up something) and it's so much more organized with something similar to a metropass called the octopus card!  The octopus card works kinda like what Montreal uses for their metro with a card that you scan on a pad.  You can top up the card with an amount and use it for the bus, streetcar, subway, and in some cases you can use it to buy things like water.  Transit itself is so cheap, one trip on the trolly/streetcar (which goes super far) is less than $0.50 Canadian!

Hong Kong Subway System!

The bus and streetcar are both double decker and run extremely frequently.  I should also mention the taxis are really cheap even though the traffic is a bit hectic.  Oh, and McDonalds delivers.  

Kowloon
We've spent most of the trip on the other side of HK, but the Kowloon side is incredibly vibrant.  Both by day and by night, it's more live and upbeat than I've ever seen Toronto.  During the day there was so much going on, between the street markets and the high class malls (one of them was a hundred times bigger and nicer than either Eaton or Sherway), and at night the city came to life.  For some reason Monster's Inc is a super big deal here.  At night, the city lit up with street performers and pedestrian only sections throughout majority of the downtown area. 

View of Hong Kong Island from Kowloon

-M