This has been the longest I’ve ever spent on a /blog.
Starting from learning an entirely new photo editing workflow to building an entire website for it to searching for a new image host (and also the post-holiday procrastination phase but shh).
It didn’t help that this day has a lot of photos and that they were really hard to edit lowlight shots.
Just look at what I had to work with:

The photos taken with my phone were still edited with the old workflow though because my old workflow involves overwriting the original file so I couldn’t re-do them anyway.

It’s the Chinese New Year period so we’re preparing a bunch of red envelopes.
These $20 (£2) notes are for tipping or for acquaintances.
For friends and family it ranges from $50 to $500 depending on how close you are. Only the married will give them out to those younger and unmarried.

My mum made a really big deal about how cold winter is here so I packed a lot of winter clothes then it turned out to be as hot as a UK summer.

Lewd umbrella wiper.

*Adds Emoji support to website todo list*

Hong Kong has quite a few vending machines though not anywhere near as much as Japan.
They all have support for the Octopus card here though.

Speaking of…
Looks like it’s time to retire mine.

Off to Tai Po Market.
My parents need to visit the bank and to arrange a certain event with our cousins… (Day 5)

Breakfast.
You won’t find better pineapple buns than in Hong Kong.
You also won’t find a more cramped diner where all the tables and chairs are smushed into an area smaller than most people’s living rooms.

Cool to see Mcdonald’s in other countries also doing the regional burger promotions.

🐈

Google’s real-time translate feature is actually pretty impressive. Though the text itself flickers between translations as your hand shakes and it re-interprets the original text differently.

You see this a lot. Just cardboard cut-outs of “authoritative figures” standing guard.

Heading to Tsim Sha Tsui for the second half of the day.

Arriving at the Victoria Habour.
You can tell where I gave up dealing with the photo noise in the top-right. That’s the one area where my camera’s jpg processor excels at compared to me.

Chinese New Year decorations are usually left up for a few weeks.

Art

It’s interesting to see what street stalls serve in different countries and what they consider fast food.

It’s a surf map.

It’s like some modeller just boolean’ed a bunch of primitives together.

The panorama everybody makes at this location.
(Open it up full-size to validate all the effort I put into it.)

It was actually really foggy on the day but editing magic~

There used to be a train station here. This clock tower is the only thing that remains.

“The Flying Frenchman”
I have no idea what it’s meant to be.

Street dancers, dancing to kpop. They weren’t very good.

Let’s check out some art.

Nice.

Very nice.

Leaving to eat. We’ll return another day.

This art looks like it was taken from Your Name.

Temple Street Night Market.
This place gets listed on a lot of tourism sites but I didn’t have a very good impression of it.
Just a lot of cheap bootleg quality goods. Some stalls were selling sex toys in broad daylight. Also street hookers.

Ugh.

An entire street of fortune tellers.

Something happened here to warrant this sign being made.

Eating here.

Tables propped up with boxes. Seems legit.

It was ok.

We ended up being the last ones to leave.
It was so loud and now it’s silent.

Just as we were leaving, a couple of western tourists showed up.
Kinda felt bad for them since the waiters rarely came up to this floor and the menu had no english.

Going to walk off the food.

An entire store dedicated to durian.

Reduce smelly.

Timotei~ Timotei~ Timoteiiii~

I didn’t actually see that many people using Line. Mostly WhatsApp and some WeChat.

Cute!

Onaholes in the pharmacy? Ok.

I think I took this same photo on a bunch of different days.

Stop.

My shiny new next-gen Octopus card.
These things have a lot more use compared to London’s Oyster card and Tokyo’s Suica card.
A reader is built into the standard card terminals here so it’s accepted in a lot more shops.
I registered it with the app and used it to top up my sim card too.

The peach cola wasn’t that great.
Bikkle is still the nectar of the Gods.
It took me a week to finish that chocolate icing. You had to really squeeze just to get out the tiniest amount.