HKG143: Nekkid

today was an odd day in terms of sights. first, on the way to catch the star ferry into TST, the kids and i passed by a woman and child begging. we see many physically disabled pan handlers here, and we almost always give money. today, we were in a bit of a hurry, and we did not stop. the woman sorta flagged us, though, pointing out my kids to her kid. when i glanced over, i noticed that the baby was wearing what i can only describe as ass-less chaps. yes. you read that correctly. the baby was wearing pants that had no crotch. i am sure this has something to do with toileting, but it still shocked me.

this afternoon, i headed out to run some errands. the first errand was taking two of my three mops back to the store to get a refund. no one could understand what i was asking, so i had a lot of time to spend in the store while employees tried to round up someone who speaks english to help me. while i was waiting, i had to keep moving out of the way of some young men who were bringing merchandise into the store. a grocery store. they were shirtless. i see shirtless men ALL the time here...mostly on construction sites. i was a little (okay, a lot) shocked to see shirtless people in the grocery store.

while finishing up my errands, i ended up walking behind a gentleman who was dressed in hot pink pants that were in the skinny style, a black sleeveless shirt covered in small, colorful flowers, and with a hot pink scarf wrapped around his neck. he had on day-glo orange tennis shoes.

other than random (and funny/shocking) observations of dress and undress, our day was a little quiet and a little crazy. the other day, i somehow stumbled upon a youtube video that showed a pretty spectacular playground at the top of a pretty spectacular mall called elements. this mall is near TST, so we hopped onto the star ferry and headed over. we found the mall after a few small issues with my sense of direction, but we never found the playground. we ended up just looking around and then having a quick lunch at mcdonald's before hopping on the mtr to come home. i sent a message to the owner of the youtube video to see if they can direct me to that playground :-)

this is the playground we tried to get to today.