Dim Sum, the "Movie Star" & Felix

Saturday, January 5th, was our last day in Hong Kong. Too bad because we were really enjoying 'living' in the city, even if it was just a vacation. Even with how long we had been there, we still had a few things to do that we somehow hadn't fit into our agenda yet. More shopping (we're addicted now & Rex still wanted a pair of Doc's), visit the Avenue of the Stars (like our Walk of Fame in P-town or the more well known version in Hollywood) and, last but not least - eat Chinese food, in particular Dim Sum, in China! Up to this point we had visited every other nation on the planet at mealtime except China.

This time we headed to a different part of the Tsim Sha Tsui area of Kowloon to shop and, miracle of miracles, Rex finally found the pair of Doc Martins he wanted. Check that off the list! By then we were near the waterfront and the boardwalk with the Avenue of Stars so we meandered that way. On the way there was a nice urban park on top of some buildings & the road overlooking the harbor with a nice kids playground, benches and a large Tai Chi courtyard. I would have loved to watch that, but no one was there at the time.

Before we got to the boardwalk, we passed a restaurant with people making Dim Sum in the window. Until then we had only seen it sold in open-air, street-side shops that looked a bit too authentic for us or in very high end restaurants. Looking at the menu we saw they had vegetable dim sum and many other vegetarian dishes so we went in. We had the Dim Sum, another doughy - not completely cooked, vegetable pastry and, believe it or not - gluten. It was a little different than what we are used to making. This was made from bean gluten. The dish was a mixture of fresh edamame, tofu & bean gluten. It was great. For those of you not vegetarian, I probably just lost you. But for those of you who are vegetarian, you know how hard it is to find legit veggie food, and how great it is when you do. Enough about the food - on to the movie star sighting.


After lunch we walked down to the boardwalk. It was sunny & warm, and walking on the boardwalk on the Kowloon side of the harbor & looking across at HK was the absolutely perfect {last day} thing to do. The Avenue of the Stars is basically a copy of ours in Hollywood, except with famous Chinese actors instead. It looked pretty new too because Bruce Lee had a star, but no hand prints, and he died in '73. Along the way we recognized a few more names; Jet Li and, of course, Jackie Chan. While we stopped for a moment to look at one of the stars a couple of teenage Chinese girls with cameras came up to us. At first I thought they wanted to have us take their picture together, but quickly realized what they really wanted was a picture of each one of them - with Rex!
Don't know if they thought he was Nicolas Cage (who he's commonly mistaken for:) or someone else, but they clearly thought he was an American movie star. We laughed as we thought about them, back at home, going through pictures in magazines trying to figure out who he was.

Our final Hong Kong experience was to have drinks that night at the infamous Felix Restaurant at the top of the even more infamous Peninsula Hotel. Another "must do" listed in all the guides. It has an unobscured view of the Hong Kong Island skyline. Not really Rex's sort of thing, but he's a good sport, and I think it was a perfect ending for our trip. I have a feeling it's not the last time I'll get to see that skyline.