Day 2 pt 2

After my early morning exploration, I met up with Aaron at Prince Edward station and we took the train out to see the giant buddha on Lantau island. Once we exited, we saw some of the newer housing developments that surrounded the station. Hong Kong's architecture is interesting to me. For one, it shows a lot of foresight in city planning. By controlling population density, they can more effectively make a "new settlement" grow; both in population and amenities. Consider the simple case of if you were to populate a new island. The Hong Kong mentality would be to send a cruise ship full of people. The Los Angeles mentality would be to send 1000 small yachts. It's pretty easy to see which civilization would work better. If it weren't for the automobile, LA would be a horrible place to live.

All that being said, perhaps they took things a little too far...


If you look closely, you can see what looks like somebody trying to escape their small apartment



I wonder what the apartments look like inside. By the way, those are TWO separate buildings built right next to each other.



We had to take a cable car up to the monastery. You can see the apartments to the right. If I ever visit this island again, I'm either going to hike that trail you can see next to the tower or bike. On the way in, I saw a bunch of people biking in so I'm assuming there's a nice trail out there.



We make it to the top. Exiting the cable car, you can just make out the buddha in the distance through the fog. The first thing that struck me was actually how "disneyland" like everything was. That should have been a big clue about this place. Aaron ruined it for me later.