National Day 01/10

We arrived into Honk Kong mid evening ( yesterday) and decided to book a hotel from the airport, we took the Metro ( MTR) to Kowloon and taxi'd from there to the Ramada Hotel, upon arrival we were checked into our closet- I shit you not, I could stand with my back against the door and pee in the toilet, ahhh the joys of budget travel...did I really turn down a mates rate at the 4S!?
HK has a pulse, a vibe, it is a mixture of Chinese and Western influence and appears to be going somewhere and at a pace
We found a cute Mediterranean restaurant and gorged ourselves on opulent Western foods such as Lobster, Foie Gras and Martinis, Ooooo the decadence and Ohhhhhh the cost, but hey were not India anymore Dorothy.

We made a plan for the day broadly followed the Lonely Planets "Things to do in HK in a day" suggestions, which involved the MTR to HK island, the peak tram to the very top of Victoria Peak which offers commanding views of the Harbour and the city and a calf burning walk back down and into Soho. our guide book is a few years old and so places we try to find often appear to not exist anymore, however we did stumble upon the Ex-pat community who all seemed to be stumbling into a pub to watch the Rugby World Cup- when in Rome!
So there we settled, England vs Scotland, a flagon of beer and a pint of Chips.

I think we like this place, it ticks a number, if not all of our boxes.

After the rugby we headed down to the waterfront, found a shopping mall to peruse (IFC1), dropped into the 4S, just to rub it in, and discovered that it was National Day and a huge firework display was planned so we MTR 'd back to Kowloon with what appeared to be the rest of Hong Kong (thousands upon thousands of people) and worked our way down to the waterfront.

At 9 o' clock on the nose, a barrage of fireworks exploded....right behind the building we were in front of, along with a few other thousand people. A mad rush ensued down the middle of the street to secure the best view point, panicked police tried to assemble barricades, but this was a tsunami of firework hungry folk and 3 cops and some yellow tape wasn't going to cut the mustard.
After 20 or so minutes the show ended in a finale that felt like someone had tripped with the lighter and the open flame had landed in the big firework box.
The streets appeared closed and all of Kong Kong was out, we worked our way back to the closet and called it a day.