Today, I found a very good noodle place close to my hostel in Monkok. Its Chinese name is 雲南桂林過橋米線. Its English name is Traditional Chinese Noodle. Besides messing up the plural of noodle, I think that they could have come up with a better English name than just Traditional Chinese Noodle. I would maybe call it Yunnan and Guilin guoqiao rice noodles, or maybe traditional Yunnan and Guilin noodles. I went to my favourite pizzeria in Hong Kong again today, which is called Paisano’s. Afterwards, I had some delicious ice cream again from an ice cream truck. Randomly, I took a picture of the picture of a sign of the building where my hostel was. The building in Chinese is called 先施大廈. In English it is called Sincere House.
19 February 2014 Sun Yat-sen Museum
The agenda for today was simple. Because today was Wednesday, and most museums in Hong Kong are free on Wednesdays, I wanted to visit a museum. I decided to visit Sun Yat-sen Museum. Finding the Sun Yat-sen museum was not extremely difficult, but did require a little bit of effort, and using the GPS on my phone. Sun Yat-sen 孫中山 was the man who in 1911 led the overthrow Qing Dynasty and started the Republic of China. A good link to learn about him more is here. Randomly, I I tried a new brand of chips which I thought were quite delicious. They are called Calbee BBQ flavoured potato chips. Calbee is a Japanese company. I put a picture of them in this post. After going to the museum, I had a nice dinner at a pizzeria.
18 February 2014 More Roaming around Hong Kong Island
17 February 2014 Roaming around Hong Kong Island
16 February 2014 Going To A Hostel and Learning About The Hong Kong Monetary Authority
One of the biggest things of the day was leaving my Couchsurfing host’s apartment for a hostel. I greatly enjoyed staying at his apartment, but had to be moving on. I moved to a hostel called Dragon hostel in Mongkok which I had stayed at before. Today, I took a few pictures of some HK money because I think Hong Kong dollars are very cool. I learned a bit about the HKD from my friend today. I noticed that private banks were printing some of the bills, and that greatly intrigued me. Normally, in countries, a central bank owned by that county’s government prints the currency. I don’t know exactly how Hong Kong regulates its currency, but I do find it very interesting that private banks in Hong Kong such as Standard Chartered, HSBC, Bank of China can print large bills for the currency of Hong Kong. I talked to my local friend who said that the Hong Kong Monetary Authority mints all the coins, but private banks print much of the bills. Here is a good link about the Hong Kong Monetary Authority from Wikipedia. And according to that link on Wikipedia “The HKMA issues banknotes only in the denomination of ten Hong Kong dollars. The role of issuing other banknotes is delegated to the note-issuing banks in the territory, namely the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Standard Chartered Bank and the Bank of China.”