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Published: April 1st 2011
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MARCH 26th---
So here I am…I’m in China! This morning I was thinking to myself how crazy it was that I was here. I’m over halfway around the world now. The time difference is officially the opposite as it is at home (just switch the am and the pm around). Now I feel really far away from home. Anyway, on to what I did the first day.
Once we got off the ship, my friends and I decided to just wander and explore the city. First off, the city is HUGE! If I had to describe it to someone I would say a very clean Manhattan (just triple the size) that looks like Vegas at night time. The first main street you walk down has the most insane amount of designer stores. People were waiting in huge lines out the door to just go inside one of them. Every place was so lavish too….the Burberry was about 10 stories high (they mostly just put offices on top of the actual store), but it still looked really big!
After wandering around for a little, we decided to just find somewhere to eat. Luckily, we were with my friend Wan
Fang (Christina) who speaks Chinese she helped us translate. She actually had a lot of trouble talking to some people because not everyone there speaks Chinese, the other main language is Cantonese. In the end, she was able to translate with some of the younger people on the streets and we ended up going to a Chinese diner. It was really good. One of the people in my group was adventurous and tried pigeon. I ended up trying it and it actually wasn’t that bad. Anyway, we mostly got things with dumplings and that was seriously the way to go. The dumplings are always really good here, no matter where you eat. Another good thing I had was this drink called a floating pineapple. It’s this homemade pineapple juice with a whole pineapple at the bottom.
After lunch, we walked around to some stores and streets to see everything for a few hours. We went to a place for a small snack to hold us over until dinner time. We had a cultural miscommunication at the restaurant. When we sat down we were given green tea. At the end of the meal each of us was charged a couple
extra dollars for the tea. We told the waitress that we never ordered this and she never told us it wasn’t free. Of course with the language barrier, she wasn’t getting it. A man sitting nearby heard our conversation and stepped in. He told me that sometimes in China; a cultural custom is to be given tea at the beginning of a meal. If you drink it or not, you always have to pay for it….it’s just sort of implied. Wow…totally missed that one! Anyways we paid and walked out. While we were walking out the man who helped us inside asked me where I was from, I told him the US and he said you must be from the west coast, I told him east coast and he was astonished. Uhhh…I don’t know you be the judge. Anyways, he moved to LA so his English was really good. Thankfully he not only helped us in the restaurant with our tea mishap, but gave us directions for the night market.
The night market was amazing. For block and blocks all you could see were white tents filled with vendors. They were selling some amazing stuff. They were really tough
bargainers and really wouldn’t give in on some prices. In the end, we got some really good deals because we are really good at bargaining now! We got hungry after two and half hours or so and found a Japanese restaurant on the sidewalk in between two of the vendors. It was funny, because a lot of SAS kids I knew were there…I mean this place was not noticeable. Anyway, this was the best meal I have had in a port this far. I don’t know if it was because it was similar to American food or because it was mostly all made with salmon! They even had mango sushi! It was all really good and pretty cheap!
After dinner we walked around for about another hour or so and then decided to find the subway back to the ship to get ready to go out.
We took a cab to this place that everyone was telling us to go to for nightlife. It is this street that goes on forever and is just filled with bars, pubs and clubs. There were so many people in the street; you would have thought it was a rave. Everyone was
dressed up in crazy costumes (I think for some rugby thing….but then again, we’re in Asia, and I heard anything goes here). We tried to go to this rooftop bar but we didn’t want to pay money to go up there, so we went halfway up and got to see an amazing view. We found all of our friends after a while. They were just blasting music out on the streets and everyone is singing and dancing. I had never experienced anything like this before. It was sort of like Mardi Gras and Carnival mixed together. Absolutely crazy! I’m mad because I didn’t bring my camera…I thought someone might steal it. But luckily, our friends brought cameras so I’ll just have to steal their pictures when I get home. Thank god for Facebook!
We stayed for 2 ½ -3 hours and then decided we had to head back to the ship. It was getting pretty late (like 2:30 am at this point), and I still needed to pack for my flight in the morning.
Overall, I really liked Hong Kong and would definitely go back again someday. I don’t feel like I can judge the city that much
because I was really only there for one day and night. But I still had an amazing time and saw some pretty cool stuff.
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