Trams

Our plan got thrown into a bit of chaos as some of us realised that we had commitments that pushed our plans of today to tomorrow. So, on top of getting up late for Hong Kong, we got out really late as we tried to build a new plan of what to do today. We then also got distracted by another computer market with the odd headphone shop, and it got frightfully quickly today.

Our guide had a recommendation for a park to visit, and on our map it was represented as a green area. This in fact turned out to be a set of courts, with very little areas to actually do something as silly as relaxing. It was interesting at least though to see this very lively area of people jumping about and socialising, while surrounded on all sides by huge sky scrapers. Hopefully nobody gets the idea of swinging a baseball bat around as there could be a lot of windows to aim for.

We finally managed to get ourselves onto one of these cute trams, with our fingers ready to block our ears for the corners. However, the squeaks from the rails in the corners wasn’t the bigger problem. The seats were made of wood, and the wheelbase of these things is actually quite short with only four wheels (of which I suspect that none actually steer). This meant that cornering wasn’t done by turning the tram so much as bouncing it between the rails whenever it wasn’t going in the right direction. When sitting orthogonally from the driving direction, on a wooden bench, this left some nice bruises on our back.

Last night, we kept on getting woken up by some bell constantly getting set off that sounded like an old fire alarm. Turns out this guess wasn’t too far off considering that we have a fire station on the other side of the street, which seems to have had a call out every 20 minutes. I guess somebody was having fun …