Tuesday morning, we wake up, have breakfast, I brush teeth and rinse with the horrible stuff that tastes like poison. I have to wait four hours before I can eat or drink, so we’ve gotten into the habit that we leave around the 2.5/3 hour mark, and plan to lunch somewhere exciting to get this nasty taste out of my mouth.
Today we aim for an area called Kai Tak. We came across the name when looking for New Year’s festivities, and it said the parade floats would be displayed at the Kai Tak Sports Park for the rest of the month. Never having heard of this area, we kind of blew it off, thinking “there’s nothing around there, so why would we go see them at this sports park”. What even is a sports park?
The Kai Tak Sports Park is built on what used to be the main airport for Hong Kong. It closed in July of 1998, and the current airport has since been where people and goods arrive into the country by air. The construction for today’s version of Kai Tak started in April of 2019, so it is still very much an area under construction. Currently, the area houses so many residental skyscrapers, three interconnected mall buildings, an arena for concerts and sporting events, a youth sports ground, lots of playgrounds and park areas, and of course lots of construction cranes and fences.
We take a bus from Wong Tai Sin to get as close as we can to the mall. It stops outside the area, and the only way in at the moment is to walk. We walk between skyscrapers in various stages of completion, some we can see have laundry out and airconditioners installed, while others are empty shells, while others yet have just been started.
The first thing the girls see, is this playground climbing structures, so they hand their bags off to us and run off. It’s good that they get some energy out before we head into the mall and sit down to eat!
Everything feels so new and modern, buildings are all glass, the landscaping is so precise.
We start in one mall building, walk to another and finally find the restaurant floor. We aim for a noodles and dumplings restaurant. Each bowl of noodles comes with a “side” of eight dumplings, so Joe and I order the noodles we want, and the girls get to pick one variety of dumplings each.
After lunch, we roam the mall, and I find this interesting wall of sake outside a specialty liquor store:
And so many stores full of cute characters. Teddy bear Spiderman, anyone?
I was wanting to visit the Sky Garden, which is supposedly half way down the old runway section, “only” about a 30 minute walk from where we are at the mall. We head outside, and find the parade floats!
And the youth sports ground, which Joe insists is open to everyone and we can go take a look. We go down this escalator into a fenced off area, with our only option is to head right back up the escalator again. Makes me wonder why it is running?
Finally we get up to where the arena is. Isn’t it beautiful?
And we found dragons that have melted into metal, which means hopefully they can’t break free. Notice the pearl in the biggest dragon head? It looks like a lamp of some sort, it must look so cool after dark!
I liked this giant sculpture around the back of the arena. In the background you can see the continued construction, I think they started the residental buildings at the middle of the runway stretch, and are expanding day by day.
This was the point where we realized we had no idea how to get down to the level we needed to be at to even be able to walk to the Sky Garden. And, we were still 25 minutes away. Google Maps kept telling us that we had to walk all the way back out of the arena area, go all the way around the main road, and then get there that way, but we didn’t want to believe it. This is how we ended up not getting to Sky Garden today, and explored the arena surroundings instead.
So many exercise stations around the entire area, meant for seniors, but also entertaining kids of all ages.
This sculpture was so cool, the plastic strings are created from melting down the construction fence pieces that surrounded the area while it was being built!
A new harbour emerges. I wonder what this place looked like in the mid to late 90’s, when the airport was at its busiest.
By the time we turned out noses homewards, we were hungry again. We decided to pick up some roast meats from the wet market closest to us, and today that included BBQ pork and roast duck. Joe steamed some rice (we have a really good white and wild rice mix, I need to look for this one when we get back home), and some gai lan.
The girls giggled lots at the fact that the plum sauce that came with the duck was packaged by “Unicorn Food Seasoning International Ltd”:
We put on a movie for the girls, and blog/work/watch the night away. Putting the girls to bed is a shorter ordeal than usual, because I have to spit “poison” every two sentences. In the end, I close the door and tell them to go to sleep. I hope it works!