king kong played ping pong while eating a ding dong in hong kong

Big Buddha

Laser Show

Fish Market

Mickey and Minnie at Hong Kong Disneyland

Sunday afternoon in Kowloon Park

What's the best part about being a teacher? Changing the lives of countless children? Seeing improvement in your students throughout the year? Or perhaps taking away something new that you may have forgotten since you were a kid, but your innocent students have retaught you? Or, it could just be summer vacation! :)

I took a quick trip to Hong Kong this past week. Wow, man, what a shopper's dream. Whether you have the means to do up-scale shopping or bargain market shopping, this is the place to do it. So as somebody who likes to look, even when the price tag is way out of my league, I loved walking the streets as I window shopped at Gucci, Tiffany's, and Louis Vuitton and then even more fun when I got to walk up and down the street markets and actually buy the knock-offs. Temple street market at night was fun, and just browsing through the fish market (for once they were all alive and swimming!) and flower markets were interesting.

I also took a day to visit Hong Kong Disneyland...which yeah, I know, sounds so completely touristy. But I'm from Orlando, Florida! I was completely hooked on seeing how the two parks compared. Overall verdict: there's no place like home. :) Hong Kong's was cool, and yes, the "queues" were much shorter, but nothing compares to Cinderella's Castle... sorry Sleeping Beauty.

Lastly, I rode the cable car up to the Big Buddha on Lantau Island. This made me think of Japan, and how different these two trips ended up being. Japan's religious sites were all hundreds of years old, while the Big Buddha was built in 1993.