10,000 Buddhas Monastery

Today we headed to the 10,000 Buddhas Monastery in Shatin, just a few subway stops from our apartment. It's located on a small mountain and was very different than any other temple we've visited before. It actually contains over 12,000 small Buddhas lining the walls of the main temple There are also hundreds of large golden statues of monks flanking the steep pathway up to the temple.

Here is the monastery from the bottom

Some of the statues looked Hindu and there were elephant statues around too....interesting.

Here are the large golden statues of Buddhist followers. Some of them had names on them so we're thinking that they each dedicated to a monk who worked and lived here. Each of the large statues were different.

Something about standing next to a large Buddha statue always makes me feel good about my weight.

Here is the main pagoda with an incense burning shrine in the foreground

Here are some of the 12,800 small Buddha statues in the temple

A three faced statuette

Some workers creating more statues

Here is the main pagoda. We could actually walk up to the top floor. Each window had a Buddha statue in the opening

Looking out one such window

Here are some people burning incense and praying to the statue

A few of the statues were female. Some holding infants, others flowers or what looked like vases

Giant sleeping Buddha with beads in his hands

A few statues on the hillside. These were mostly riding animals of some kind

Here was an impressive white statue at the base of a small waterfall, the dragon's head at the bottom spurted out water

Fun day!

Friday is Teacher Development Day

Well we didn't have to go to school today. YAY!!!! But we did have to go to a training day. BOOOO!!! We all went to another affiliated school about an hour away where all of the Native English Teachers (NET) had to attend. There were about 40 - 50 NET's there from 11 schools in Hong Kong.

In the morning we learned about differentiating our lesson plans to suit the diverse needs of children. A lot of it was common sense. Some of it was helpful such as how children learn and how to include the different learning styles into your lesson plan.

In the afternoon we attended a session on story telling. Again a bit of common sense but it was interesting to have the different areas of story telling broken down so you can focus more on positively reinforcing a learning aspect to a fun story.

During lunch we met up with the 5 Chinese teachers from our school for lunch. They were attending another development session in Chinese a few blocks away at another school. We headed to a Dim Sum restaurant for a traditional Chinese feast. I always talk to my co-teacher, Ms. Lau, about eating strange food when traveling, so today she made sure cow stomach, intestine soup and two different kinds of chicken feet were ordered. YUMMY. That was only 3 of the 20 some dishes that they ordered. The rest were normal.....well relatively normal.

So we got a memo about the seminar and the dress code at first said "Business Casual" but then we heard we could wear jeans and sneakers but to look presentable. I guess to our co-teacher Alain, "presentable" means fluorescent yellow shoes, bright green pants, bright orange shirt, blue vest and shiny orange sunglasses. He also had a rainbow colored bracelet and purple and white striped socks. Needless to say, he was a focal point of many stares.

Here we are sitting down for lunch. Too bad you can't see the rest of Alain's outfit.

The first of many rounds of dishes.

Chicken Feet

A tower of Dim Sum dishes

It was all really tasty. If it wasn't so hard to order in English I think we would eat at these restaurants more often.

More weird fruit. This one is called a Jackfruit. We bought them pre-packaged at the supermarket, already pealed and ready to eat. They too were really good, sweet and unlike anything else we've tasted. Let the tasting continue.

This is a picture I got off the net to show what it looks like whole. It's quite large and bumpy.

New Food

We've been trying to be adventurous with trying new fruit lately and here are two that we tried that were really good.

This one is a Mangosteen. It grows in South East Asia. The outer shell is hard, you have to score it around the middle and pull the two pieces apart. The inside part tastes like rhubarb but sweeter and fruitier. Tonight we tried this fruit called a custard apple. They were really good. They grow in South East Asia, Australia, and parts of Africa. They are very sweet and the insides are mushy like custard. There were a few black seeds inside which were a bit annoying to spit out.

While they don't look that appetizing they get a 10 out of 10 from me for taste.

Hopefully we'll be trying more in the future.

Yet more visitors

So we had lived in Korea for a number of years and only had 1 visitor the whole time we were there. Kathy came to visit us when we lived in Changwon. We've only lived in Hong Kong for less than 3 months and have already had 3 visitors. Our friends with whom we worked with in Korea are here doing a visa run for another stint in Korea and we were able to catch up with them.

Kate and Randy were here for about a week.

We like having people pop in, it's nice. We hope we get more in the future.

Visit to the Police Station

My upper level class had a trip to the police station on Wednesday. It was fun. Fortunately I only had 5 students go.

Here is a cute picture of 3 of my students posing in front of a police van.

More Visitors

My friend Andrea from University just happens to be in Hong Kong now visiting some family. She's from Toronto but her grandparents and extended family are from HK. It was great catching up with her. The last time I saw her was in 2005.BTW: I think that's apple juice we're drinking.

We had some time to walk around a bit and saw this spiral escalator. I tried to look it up on the internet and could only find out that there are not many curved escalators in the world. There are 4 commonly known ones in California, Las Vegas, Singapore and this one in Hong Kong.


Here we are crossing the harbor in the ferry to check out the Christmas display in Kowloon.

Sunday of Shopping

So we've heard about an Outlet mall out by the airport where you can by genuine merchandise at cheap prices. So we figured we didn't have much to do so we headed over there. It looked like a regular mall but everything was about 50% to 70% off. There were shops like Adidas, Calvin Klein, Columbia, Coach, Esprit, Guess, Nike, Quicksilver, Levi's and a bunch of others just to name few.
Surprisingly Jill didn't buy much and it was I who went on a bit of a shopping spree. I spent over $1,000!!!! Hong Kong dollars that is. That works out to about $140 Canadian.

For this $140 I got a nice pair of running shoes and some Oakley sunglasses.

I've started jogging so I thought I should invest in some nice running shoes. Today I ran about 8km's.