What better way to get to know Hong Kong than on a tour in an open-top bus. 
The sights and sounds of the city all around us, wind in our face, and no need to tire our legs out by walking made for 2 enjoyable days of touring.
With a recorded commentary of the sights and history of Hong Kong, we learned and saw lots of interesting things.
This is a typical street view of a business district in Hong Kong. Towering buildings for offices, expensive shopping malls, and restaurants, are lined with giant advertisements, lots and lots of people, and honking cars and buses.
Squeezed in between the tall buildings and packed tightly together are street vendors selling things like clothing, shoes, bags and purses, toys, souvenirs, jewelry, electronics, and food. Some of the more popular markets, like the "Ladies Market" even close the streets to vehicle traffic to accommodate the large increase in pedestrians during peak shopping hours.
One of the stops on the tour bus was the Man Mo Temple.
It is one of the oldest temples built in Hong Kong and is dedicated to 2 gods, Man - the god of literature, and Mo - the god of war.
The building is filled with a heavy haze of smoke as worshippers burn incense in different forms, including these hanging incense coils.
Just be careful walking through the temple because ash does fall from the coils - Cade and Kyle learned the hard way.
The bus tour also took us along the beautiful, coastline towns of Stanley and Aberdeen.
The most popular beaches in Hong Kong are found along this southern part of the Hong Kong island, including Repulse Bay.
In the mid 1800s, pirates occupied this bay. But the British Navy battled the pirates to protect their Hong Kong residents shipping and foreign trade. They were able to "repulse" the pirates out of the bay, thus giving the bay its name.
High rise buildings are everywhere in Hong Kong
but it's difficult to show in pictures just how tall and daunting they really look from below.
Here's a few attempts by our photographers Cade and Abby.
The tallest building in Hong Kong (and 4th tallest in the world) is the Sky100 building (another post will cover our visit to this building).
Interestingly, we learned that the number of floors in a building can be deceiving. The number 4 is unlucky in Chinese (the number 4 sounds like the word for death) so many buildings do not have a 4th floor and some skip all floors with a 4 in it, like 14, 24, or 40-49. Therefore, a building with 68 floors may really only have 52 floors.
This golden bauhinia blakeana flower statue was given to Hong Kong from the Chinese government in the 1997 handover ceremony when Britain returned Hong Kong to China.
In a similar handover ceremony from Portugal to China in 1999, Macau was given a golden lotus flower statue (we still need to visit this site in Macau but we'll share pictures when we do).
During our 2 day tour of Hong Kong, it's hard not to notice all the construction projects. Maybe it's our engineering and construction backgrounds, but Kyle and I are still amazed at the use of bamboo for scaffolding. While eating lunch on a pier one day, we even got to watch a group of guys hang over the water and tie bamboo together to form scaffolding on the pier.
But, the craziest thing we learned about on our bus tour was unfortunately not captured in pictures. While driving by an underpass, we saw a number of older women pounding on things. We discovered they were "villain hitting", a common voodoo practice in Hong Kong. This practice is used to put a curse on an enemy. First, details or information about the enemy are written on a human-shaped piece of paper. Then, the sorcerer hits the paper with a shoe (we really saw women doing this!). Then, the paper is burned and the ensuing curse can last anywhere from 1 week to all eternity.
Crazy - but I'm not making it up. We could only have learned this stuff on our awesome big bus tour!
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