On our second day in Hong Kong we changed from a hotel in Kowloon to one in Causeway Bay, our main plan for the day was to catch up with my old High School friend Lillian and her family. When we arrived at our hotel we had plenty of time to look around before we met the others for lunch.
Causeway Bay is very different to Kowloon, its much quieter and it feels very much like a place where everyday people live.
We spend much of the morning wandering around Victoria Park and while these photos make it look pretty empty it was a hive of activity! There were joggers, runners, cyclists and people practicing all kinds of martial arts and dance routines as well as families and older folk sitting around enjoying the sunshine.
We met Lillian, her husband Ben and cute wee daughter Lauren at a Yum Cha (Dim Sum) place in Causeway Bay - it was awesome to be heading out with locals because they know where to eat and they also speak Cantonese so there wasn't any barrier for us going to have Yum Cha, we just told them what type of things we wanted to eat.
Lillian asked us was there anything we really wanted to see in Hong Kong that we could all go and do together, I told Lillian I love Guedetama and I really wanted to visit the Guedtama Cafe I had read about - it turned out Lillian loves Guedetama as much as me so we caught the subway to the Guedetama cafe straight after Yum Cha!
If you have no idea who Gudetama you can see him in the you tube video below, he's basically an adorable sleepy egg!
I was pretty excited to get to visit to super Kawaii cafes in a matter of two days! Lillian and I had a look around the gift shop while we waited for some seats.
Pretty much everything in the cafe was Guedetama themed from the food right down to the seats!
Seen as we had already had lunch, we decided to get drinks and dessert and everything was pretty amazing and adorable.
We did a bit of shopping together, but Lauren was getting tired so it was time to part ways. When we told Lillian that we had no plans for the rest of the day she suggested we head over to PMQ located in Central which is an art market in a historic building which is totally our kind of thing so with directions from Lillian we went to check it out.
The walk to the market was almost as interesting as the market itself! Lots of street art (including yarn bombing!) and interesting stores.
It turns out PQM is in an old Police Station, the building is huge! So I wonder if it was the national office or perhaps it used to have a lot of cells. There is a big open area at the bottom and then a tonne of cute stores on each level. I was surprisingly restrained in here, I could have spend our whole trips budget in some of these stores.
Unfortunately you couldn't play these piano's - well not that I can play piano anyway, but Rich can!
A lot of the stores had classes available as well as selling their products, we saw a jam making course in action on the ground floor when we arrived. If I lived in Hong Kong I would have wanted to take SO MANY courses here!
When we were visiting PMQ they had and art on stairs project happening where a number of different artists had painted the staircases in the building - here were a few of my favourites.
This is the end of our FIRST trip to Hong Kong (we went back there later in our trip) - next stop Manila!
