We’ve just arrived back at the hotel after skilfully missing the greatest fireworks show on Earth by half an hour. We checked the time on the web before planning the day, but it just goes to show that you can’t trust everything you read on the internet, and in retrospect we should’ve double checked the time with the concierge. Anyway, the day wasn’t a total loss…

We left the hotel a little later today (around 9pm) and had breakfast at the Metropolitan Cafe - a highly stylised cafe in the business district that serves sandwiches, panini and custom salads. After a casually devouring ham, egg and cheese panini’s we headed down to the MRT, boarding a train for the mainland and our next port of call.

As today had been designated a “shopping day”, we paid a visit to “shopping district” of Kowloon. Thanks to the holidays, everything was closed when we arrived so we did a little wandering and window shopped at some of the jewellery stores and markets, before finally ending up in a tea house sipping green teas. We both noticed that amongst all the shop signs and New Year decorations where a lot of notices for hotels that charged by the hour - people must get tired from all that shopping…

We had it on good advice that Mong Kok (pretty much a Hong Kong version of Tottenham Court Road) was where the locals shopped, and where we were least likely to get scammed. Shops started opening up en-masse by about mid-day, and my first priority was the photographic outlets. Equipment is definitely cheaper here, as I managed to save about 40% on UK prices.

Emma’s perpetual mission to find reasonably priced jewellery is always hampered in these places by the fact that she hates diamonds, which unfortunately makes up 95% of the stock in most jewellery shops of the world. It’s also seems impossible to find clothes that fit us- obviously, the average size of most Chinese people is proportionally less than it is back home, with “large” sizes roughly equivalent to a “small” in the UK (though knowing this doesn’t stop you from feeling overweight…)

We decided to take the ferry back to the Island, where we managed to get a fantastic view of the skyline and the mountainous backdrop.