Mecca... for shopping... for women

Far and away the most common question I received when I told people last week I was heading to Hong Kong was, "Are you going to go shopping?" Well, seeing as I was traveling with a little lady, there most certainly was shopping time budgeted, even if I was pretty sure I wouldn't be doing much of the shopping. Hong Kong may be a little island of western products amid the sea of Chinese imitations, but the real stars of Hong Kong (the things cheaper than on the mainland) are the cosmetics, shoes and electronics - two of which I had zero interest in, and I lacked the cash for the third.

In the end we 'budgeted' our third and final day for shopping - a whole day just for shopping would seem like enough! Yet once we factored meals, our flight time, sleeping in after two exhausting days and a quick 20 minutes spent viewing sky scrappers, our shopping time was reduced to a matter of hours, much to the chagrin of my girlfriend.

We trekked uptown in Kowloon to find what is apparently 'the market' for shopping, bypassing two or three other street markets (which admittedly didn't look as good). It was about two solid blocks of shops lining the streets with another row of shops actually sitting in the street the entire way. They sold most any knickknack you could imagine they'd sell - shoes, bags, clothing, pots 'n' pans, children's toys, ipod covers, and kitchen mops.

In the end we bought a little of everything, just because that's what you do in Hong Kong. We made sure to buy our skincare products there, because everything in the mainland is chock full of whitening agents (it's rumored the Chinese first thought Casper was a deity... just kidding). Us westerners prefer the tanned look, so to be safe we need to buy everything we put on our faces outside of Chinese China. But even with our shopping bonanza of an afternoon, I still don't get credit for leaving enough time for shopping.

Where there is money, there is shopping; and in Hong Kong there's both.