Although Hong Kong is FULL of sky scrapers, almost any MTR station you go to there will also be temples (I feel like I can count a nunnery as a temple, they really do look the same- especially as I didn’t see any nuns!) It’s slightly weird because you think you’re in a completely urbanized area and then you turn a corner and there’s a temple, garden and they’ll sometimes throw in a fake waterfall if you’re lucky. It really feels as if you’re in the setting of a movie, like Karate Kid ( Disclosure: I’ve never watched that movie and all my knowledge of its plot has been taken from How I Met Your Mother). I feel bad going into temples and taking photos, I’ve done it in churches but usually there aren’t people praying in them, unless you whip out your camera on a Sunday. In Hong Kong at almost any time of the day you’ll find people praying, often it’s quite busy. I’ve grown to love the smell of incense as its always being burned, people buy it near by and there are often fires around the compound, which I find awesome but the locals give me weird looks when I keep taking pictures of them.
One of the things that people do is take a container filled with sticks and shake them while thinking of a question they want answered about their life. They wait for a stick to fall out and when one does they record the number from it and then get someone to interpret the meaning of it for them. I did it but didn’t get someone to tell me what the number meant, I feel like I wasn’t thinking of hard enough, and I want to do my question justice!
