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Published: March 17th 2008
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We arrived in Hong Kong a day later than thought thanks to a cancelled Cathay Pacific flight. No worries, we enjoyed a relaxed hotel room day with three full meals in their tab.
I was expecting a lot from Hong Kong it being my first Asian destination. Carolina had prepped me to be prepared with lots and lots of people everywhere with her experience from Bangkok and Southeast Asia in general.
We were still traveling on a budget so we didn’t take the fancy Airport Express to Kowloon where our guesthouse was. We took the bus which cost us $66 total which is about €6. The train would’ve cost us a whopping €17! 😉
Our guesthouse was a pleasant surprise! It was in the budget travelers accommodation paradise, Chunking Mansions. Our host Simon was superb and helped us with everything we needed. Do Je to him!
We arrived late afternoon so all we did the first day was take in the air of the busy Hong Kong lifestyle. We loved it! Not the food though. It is so true what I had heard. We both love Chinese food, but the Chinese food in China is so different
from the rest of the world, and the authentic food didn’t have much to praise for… We tried to do it safe and order stuff we thought we knew just to get some slimy dish in front of us… A week of this food wasn’t a tempting thought. We managed though and we didn’t starve 😊
Shopping is a big deal in Carolina’s life and so we started with that, hoping to do most of it on the first day so later on the week we wouldn’t have to go into every single shop we saw. (How wrong was I… 😊 They’ve done it very interestingly in Hong Kong, shopping that is. I’ll give you an example. They had a shopping market street just for Women. They had a street full of shops selling electronics, such as cameras, phones and computers. They had a street full of shops selling sporting goods. They had a street selling just mens clothing. They had an area where you could buy just tiles for your bathroom. They had an area where the shops just sold carpet and parquet floors. You get the point? It was pretty funny, but very, very convenient.
Yeah,
needless to say, We shopped. Jackets, shirts, boots, memory cards, a suitcase, etc. We also went to see a football game. Carolina’s first. And who else happened to be in town but David Beckham and the LA Galaxy. Just to be sure we’ve got proof we were there. A journalist interviewed us and we got into the South China Morning Post which has 26 000 000 and so subscribers. I don’t know if the article is online but they spelled my name Blankexship so if anyone has too much time and finds the article please send a link to me 😊 We’ve got the actual paper too if somebody doubts us. The match itself was a friendly and quite a boring one but it was fun to watch the crazy Chinese people go even more crazy when Becks just looked to the stands.
We also spent a day in Macau. A much quiet version of Hong Kong. Big Casinos. And a lot of Portuguese influence. Most memorable things there were probably Carolina’s hunger, which drove us finding a restaurant and eventually ending up in McDonalds, and the bicycle taxi back to the ferry was a fun experience too.
We also went to Lantau Island and took a skyrail to Ngong Ping village and saw the largest outside Buddha in the world. It was a very nice change from Hong Kong because there were hardly any people there, probably cause we were there pretty early in the morning, and it was so quiet.
We didn’t go up to the Peak, which supposedly is a must do in Hong Kong. We just didn’t want to cramp into a cable car with too many people in it. We opted to go into the Sky lounge which was on the top floor of the Sheraton. We got a very good view and its free unless you opt to have a €10 drink, which was worth the money for us 😊
p.s. I found a link for the beckham newspaper link.
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