HAPPY LUNAR NEW YEAR! May the Year of the Horse bring you health, wealth and happiness!
Today is Lunar New Year, so we have no school today, just going on adventures in hunt of festivities. Joe picks the mall in Sha Tin in the hopes that they have lion dancers going around the mall today. It’s strange, how most independent stores and restaurants will be closed today, yet the mall is open? We take the subway to Sha Tin, with all fingers crossed that at least something will be open…
And the mall certainly is open! We head to New Town Plaza, which is several buildings all connected and they all have the same name, with “phases 1, 2 and 3”. The first thing we do, is take our New Year family photo:
The mall is open, but lots is closed. It’s a weird feeling, there are people about, there are a few stores open, most restaurants are open, but there are near zero shoppers inside the stores. People are here to celebrate and enjoy, not to shop. For us, we’re here to lunch, to find a performance or two, and to see what’s around.
We find out that the mall has a Tim Ho Wan, an award winning dim sum restaurant that Joe and I have visited before at one of their other locations. Funny story: When Joe and I came to Hong Kong in 2013, our first time here together, we visited a Tim Ho Wan that had just opened in a new mall, as in that same week, as in the celebratory flowers were all still outside the entrance. We walk in, order our favourite dim sum dishes, and when the spring roll came to the table, I instantly bit into it. I burned my entire mouth. The roof of my mouth, the inside of my cheeks, my tongue, all severely burned. Joe asked for a glass of water for me, they bring a cup of hot water. That’s all they had! It took days for it to heal, but I will never forget my first Tim Ho Wan experience.
Anyways, we take a number, as their queue system is an elaborate one. We see that tables for 3-4 people are 30 tickets out, along with tens of tickets for all other size of groups as well. We think “this will take HOURS”, and walk across the hall to a Cafe de Coral, HK diner but fast food version. I go back and hand our ticket to a family of three waiting for their table, hoping that it will help them get in a little sooner than their own ticket.
The girls are excited to see kids’ sets available, and order one each. Joe and I, assuming there will be plenty of leftovers, order one dish to share. Joe ends up eating the noodle soup, and I have the toast and scrambled eggs. Maylin did not touch her pasta, so I had that too.
After lunch, we headed outside one of the doors, as we had seen a giant Snoopy out there in passing earlier. It’s an entire playground, complete with boat ride, all Snoopy and Charlie Brown themed!
After exploring Snoopy’s world, and hanging out at the playground for a bit, we headed back inside to contine exploring the mall. We found so much cute stuff, as always, like a store called McHugs:
We end up seeing another fun place through the doors on a different floor, and when we headed out to the Dinosaur themed playground, we discover they have an entire world on different levels outdoors at this mall! Lots of fun was had on the outside of this mall, especially climbing through a dinosaur mouth to enter the slides.
After we had finished exploring Sha Tin and the New Town Plaza, we headed home. For the last few days, the roads between the subway and grandma’s building have been absolutely packed. The tour buses have created nothing but chaos, and emergency vehicles have been stuck everywhere. It’s all due to the temple at Wong Tai Sin, where the god of healing sick and granting wishes resides. People are here to pray for healing and tell him their wishes. In fact, Joe’s aunt messaged last night, saying that if we were still awake, we should go down to the temple and watch as people lined up to be the first ones blessed after midnight. We did not go down, we went to bed instead…
We get home around 3pm, and by 5pm, we’re on our way back out. Tonight is the New Year’s parade, and we’re heading downtown to watch it! We do not have tickets for the seating area in front of the stage, so we are going to try our luck along the parade route. We hop on the number 1 bus, and get off when the regular route has been blocked to traffic, and walk the rest of the way.
It’s 5.45pm, and we’re in for a long night on a sidewalk somewhere, so we decide to look for a washroom and a snack. I see what looks like a restaurant building, so we duck in to try our luck. On the second floor, there is a KFC, but the washrooms are locked. We line up to buy some food to snack on while we walk, and borrow the washroom key. Once that is all done, we continue down towards the parade route, snacking on chicken and waffle fries.
The parade starts and ends down by the Star Ferry terminal, where already last week the bleachers were set up and ready for the festivities. The parade then goes north, turns east, and then turns south to come back down on Nathan Road. Nathan Road is like the main street, cutting Kowloon in half and centering all tourism activities, at least that’s what it feels like to me. We find a spot along the fence on the south side of the road, and wait.
There are about 15 groups of entertainers, everything from marching band, dancers, youth groups and others that come through while we wait. We get to our spot around 6pm, and the parade doesn’t start until 9pm. It’s a matter of fighting the crowd for our precious two spots by the fence, so the girls can see. 15 minutes into the wait, Maylin says she wants to go home. Then the groups start walking by, and they actually come around 4 times in total, to keep the crowd entertained while they wait for the main event. She doesn’t ask to go home again, she’s enjoying this!
The following pictures are stills from the videos I took. They’re not the greatest, but I’ll enjoy going through the videos with the girls when we’re far from Hong Kong. I hope you get the gist of the experiences!
There were dragons and lions, there were dancers and musicians, the Disneyland float was super cute with Mickey, Donald and Duffy, I could fill the entire blog up with pictures and videos from tonight!
In the end, we ducked out before the parade finished, in the hopes that we would beat the crowds on the subway. It actually worked, the ride home was very smooth, no insane crowds, no pushing and stomping at the stations or on the subway. We got home at 10.45pm, and of course went straight to bed. I think Maylin was asleep about 3 minutes after her head hit the pillow, where usually it takes her a good 30 minutes to slow down at the end of the night.
Tomorrow is a new day, and we get to see most of the family for lunch!