Mid Levels / Hollywood Road

After we rode the Peak Tram, we wandered around Central. Central is basically the business district, and the Mid-Levels are the residential piece kind of directly behind Central. This is the view to the East near the tram station.The fashionable by day, party by night Lan Kwai Fong district. Some of the best restaurants in Hong Kong we found in this area... more on that later!Looking up towards the mid-levels in Lan Kwai Fong... The Mid-Levels Escalator! At last! We had heard rumors about this escalator, the longest covered outdoor escalator in the world. Since Hong Kong is so hilly and everyone walks everywhere, they figured this would help people get where they wanted to go! The escalator runs down from the mid-levels to central in the mornings until about 10am. Then it runs up the hills for the rest of the day and all night.
The escalator is basically a huge moving sidewalk, which stops at bisecting streets so you can get on and off where you please. It runs for 800 meters, and it would take about 20 minutes from start to finish if you just stand and ride the whole thing. It's completely free, which is kind of amazing, but it would probably take more time to charge people to ride it. It was really nice to be able to hop on and off at specific spots. The escalator has been running since 1993, and I am sure it has made a considerable difference in the mornings and afternoons of its riders!
As you ride, you also get an interesting perspective of the mid-levels themselves. I guess just like most urban cities, people live above retail space, and Hong Kong might rival any city with the amount of retail space here. Lots of interesting areas were intersecting the escalator. It was very helpful that so many signs are in English as well as Chinese. Most things seemed to default to English, except for shops, stores, or restaurants. We weren't really in the mood for shopping on this day, but enjoyed seeing what was there! When you see the street that you want to get off on, you just exit the escalator and take the stairs down to street level.

Hollywood Road. No, I'm not kidding. And there is even an area called SoHo (south of Hollywood Road) and NoHo (north of Hollywood Road). This was a cool part of town with all sorts of neat places. There were pubs, restaurants, huge apartment buildings, a busy street- Hollywood Road seemed like another major conduit, south (towards the middle of the island) of Queens Road. (Basically the escalator takes you in this direction.) But the interesting thing is that Hollywood Road wasn't named after Hollywood California. It was named in 1844 for the second British Governor of Hong Kong. Go figure! Well, true to form with the other Hollywood, this area is swanky and one of the shinier parts of HK. The street is wide, and the shops are interesting. Lots of antiques and housewares. Surprisingly (haha, not really) I saw some cool wine glasses in a store window that I wanted to take home with me. I did not get them however, because-oh my gosh- they were so fragile looking, I just knew they would never make it home in one piece. And that would have made me so sad!While we were walking, it was interesting to watch the people working on these super steep side streets. Guys would literally push wheeled carts up these hills at a running/crouching level. Sometimes the carts would be replaced by a rolling office chair where the object was secured with shrink wrap- pretty funny to imagine, but keep in mind its 90+ degrees and humid. So there were a lot of sweaty guys with no shirts on down these streets. They were working hard. Anything and everything you could imagine could be found in this area, fresh fruit stand to electronics, to bed sheets.Again, the English signs are so helpful....It just keeps going up and up. I don't think we went past Hollywood Road, but the escalator would take you as far as Robinson Road, and higher, possibly to Conduit Road. I think Robinson was the furthest up that we made it on our visit.