I went out at 6:00 AM, forgetting that it was Sunday. There’s not a lot open at 6:00 AM on Sunday, even in Hong Kong. But on the plus side, the streets aren’t crowded.

I took the ferry to Central and wandered around for a while until Starbucks opened, after which I went looking for the bus to the Victoria Peak tram. While doing that, I saw the stairs to the escalators to the Mid-Levels, and decided to do that first. Of course, it was still Sunday, and things were still closed, but I did go in the Man Mo temple.

Man is the god of literature and Mo is the god of war, so when you put them together you get…what? Hitting people with books? I’m not really clear on the specifics, but in practice, it seems to involve large amounts of sandalwood incense, hanging from the ceiling in coils.

Or stuck in bowls, alongside flaming candles.

Parts of the shrine had colored lights and looked suspiciously like Christmas trees.

I like sandalwood, but after a while it got hard to breathe, so I went back down the escalators toward the bus terminal.

Along the way I passed some people sitting on the sidewalk on pieces of cardboard. As I walked, I saw more and more of them.

At first I thought they were street people, but there were too many of them, and they weren’t asking for handouts. Then I noticed that they were all women, and they were apparently planning to camp out for a while, because some of them were constructing more elaborate housing.

All of this was happening outside of a mall called World-Wide Plaza, so I went inside.

There were pscrillions of people.

The vendors were selling everything from phone service to day-old donuts, and it was all marketed toward Filipinos. Wikipedia says:

The kiosks or shop units are typically from around 10 square metres, and are rented out to small traders, who sell telecommunications and banking services, to food, and magazines. The arcade is popular with the large Filipino population, particularly on Sundays, as many of the shops are run by their compatriots. The wide assortment of typically small shops caters to their needs, selling merchandise from their homeland.

Which doesn’t explain why they’re all women, or why Sundays, or why the cardboard. My guess is that they’re all domestic servants, that Sunday is their only day off, and that the place is so crowded that they have to wait hours to get in.

But where do they get all the cardboard?

This was all adjacent to the central bus terminal, where I learned that the bus to the Victoria Peak tram does not leave from the bus terminal, a small but crucial detail that my guide book neglected to mention. Instead, it leaves from the ferry terminal, where I had been a few hours earlier.

By now it was 10:00, though, so I decided to go see the giant Buddha on Lantau Island and save Victoria Peak for later.