Golden Week Day 7: Last day in HK

This is the last installment of this series, and I did a terrible job of taking pictures on my last day in Hong Kong.  I had breakfast at a noodle place in Causeway Bay where I had a noodle soup with fish balls and some other unidentified things in it.

It was still sort of rainy, so I decided to take it easy and check out the Hong Kong Heritage Museum up in the New Territories (the northern part of Kowloon).  Part of the trip there involved a double-decker bus; I made a point of riding on the top level just because it was novel.  I was a little worried that it would be room after room of Ming dynasty pottery, but it was much more interesting than that.  They a great big exhibit of Tibetan religious art and a couple of exhibits on Cantonese opera with lots of costumes and clips from performances.  If I’d been in Hong Kong longer I definitely would have tried to see an opera; I’ll have to keep an eye out and see if they ever come to Osaka or anything.  There was a huge exhibit on Roman Tam, who was an iconic Canto-pop star for decades.  My favorite part of that exhibit was the videos of some of his concerts; he was very into outlandish Las Vegas-style costumes with lots of sequins and peacock feathers and that sort of thing.  There was one number where he shared the stage with a bunch of women in cat costumes whose job was apparently to sort of paw in his general direction while he was singing. 

After the museum, I went back to Causeway Bay and had an early dinner at Kung Tak Lam, a very well-reviewed vegetarian Shanghaiese restaurant.  It was incredibly awesome food, and motivated my only photographs for the day.

 They brought out this appetizer thing -- peanuts with a little seaweed and (I think) both salt and sugar.

Left: fried rice with seaweed.  Right: Sauteed mushrooms with asparagus and some kind of mock meat in a hot and spicy sauce.  Yes, I did eat both of those.

After eating I went back to the hostel, picked up my backpack from the front desk, and started making my way to the airport.  I flew to Shanghai, where I had an overnight layover (too short to really do anything interesting), and then got on another plane to Osaka.  I picked up a copy of Martin Jacques's When China Rules the World at the Hong Kong airport and read about half of it on the way home.  Interesting, although I was a little surprised to see a book with buzzwords like "contested modernity" and "civilization-state" being sold at the airport right next to the Twilight series.  After that, it was pretty much back to real life.