Day 86: Hong Kong Science Museum, The University of Hong Kong, and Victoria Peak

After a delicious brunch with the north India girl

Such savor

I decided to go to the area around The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, home to the Hong Kong Museum of History and Hong Kong Science Museum.

The science museum was geared more towards children, though many of the exhibition signs had a confusingly large number of physical equations and derivations written on them. The museum has a water wall that I had previously seen somewhere on the interwebs. The wall has a row of faucets at the top that rapidly produce drops of water. Under normal viewing conditions, the droplets would only look like a continuous, though weak flow of water. But because strobe lights are positioned to flash on the water wall, the lights and the falling water produce a "wagon wheel" effect where, by varying the relative drop rates of the faucets and/or the strobe rate, it appears that the water droplets are suspended in air or flowing upward.

Tired from walking around the science museum, I skipped the history museum for now and walked to The Hong Kong Polytechnic University in search of refreshments and to see the campus. The campus was a good respite from the business of Hong Kong, but it was already late afternoon and I quickly left PolyU on the MTR for The University of Hong Kong.

School of Design at PolyU

HKU is built a terrifyingly large height above the street and has a peaceful courtyard "centennial" campus on one side of the MTR station and its main campus on the other. 

Scary

Student activity on both PolyU and HKU campuses were minimal when I visited, classes probably having been canceled for the holiday. While walking through the main campus I found within the student amenities building a music room with an upright piano! A sign indicated that the room was freely available for use by any HKU student, so I decided to temporarily enroll myself in the university. It was the first time since leaving Seattle that I had had access to a piano in a more or less private room, so I wasn't sure what to expect from my fingers. I can still play, but I've mostly forgotten any pieces I learned from sheet music, and arpeggios felt noticeably more awkward to execute.

It was past 7 by now and I still wanted to see Victoria Peak before my flight to Osaka the next day. From Central I walked to the tram ticketing area, and after 30 minutes in line I was on my way up to the peak. 

Here comes the tram

I didn't know there was anything other than a viewing platform at the top, so I was a bit surprised when the tram dropped us off at Peak Tower, an 8-floor shopping complex nearly 400 meters above sea level and buried in an anti-node of Victoria Peak.

From the tram terminus, a series of escalators take you to the viewing platform. The view looks essentially the same as it does in every photo from the top few Google image search results for "Hong Kong".

The smog from the city makes the landscape less than crisp, but the close proximity of the CBD and the numerous electric billboards and light fixtures on the buildings below make for a sight to see. After another 30 minutes in line I was back near sea level again. The descent/ascent is so steep in some places that passing buildings look as if they're skewed relative to gravity. Back at the hostel I went out for dinner with a few others. Upon returning we joined another group that was leaving to go to Eye Bar, a bar on the 30th floor of the nearby shopping center, iCenter.

Eh, the view's alright for a bar

Neither I nor my northern Indian friend were in the mood for drinks, so after giving the view sufficient contemplation we went back to the hostel where I went to bed soon afterwards in anticipation of my 12:30pm flight the next day.