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Published: September 10th 2010
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After a very long flight from Heathrow (13 hours in total), during which I managed a lovely two hours of sleep (John did a little better with five!), we finally arrived in Hong Kong at 1pm local time (which was something stupid like 4am UK time!). For once though, I didn’t care! 😊 I was married and in Hong Kong!!! Nothing was going to stop me smiling right then! On arrival at the airport, we had to go through various security health checks, which worried us slightly because of John’s chest infection, but we managed to get through with no problems, before picking up our cases. When we stepped out of the airport to the taxi ranks, the heat hit us immediately. After leaving autumnal weather in Newcastle, it was a slight culture shock to suddenly find ourselves in stifling heat, but if anything it was good, because it gave us an immediate sense of being very far from home! John absolutely loved the taxis, though I have to say that even now, I don’t really understand why! It just felt like a normal taxi to me, lol. Our first impressions on driving towards the city was that it was very
high...I swear, every building we passed was at least 50 stories high! The journey lasted about 40 minutes, and then we were dropped off at our hotel, the Park Lane, where we got an upgrade to a deluxe room as a honeymoon treat 😊 The room was really nice, with an amazing view out to Victoria Park and part of the harbour, and the hotel itself was also really fab, with loads of restaurants and shops (I was to discover later that day why this was particularly exciting!). We were really impatient to see the city, and still feeling surprisingly awake, so we had a quick shower, change and then rushed out.
The hotel was in the middle of the Causeway Bay area of the city, and I sensed immediately that we had made a very good decision staying there. It was so crowded and busy, insanely hot, but that was exactly how we imagined Hong Kong to be, and it was just what we wanted to experience. It’s the main shopping district, and there were loads of shopping malls, huge department stores, well-known labels, but also a lot of tiny, little, independent shops (selling clothes, food, CDs...pretty much
anything!) in amongst it all. It was SO cool! We wanted to do some major exploring of the city that day though, so we didn’t stay too long (we knew we’d be back there a fair bit!), walking instead to the Admirality/Central district. This is the area of the city with all the skyscrapers, financial offices, very exclusive shopping malls...and also insanely annoying walkways! You couldn’t walk anywhere without having to climb up walkways to cross roads, and it was all just a big pain in the arse, to be honest. We’d been told this was the best part of the city, and that advice was very, very incorrect! Anyway, we spent a bit of time in places like the Landmark shopping mall, which weren’t too exciting (lots of designer shops, same as you’d see in any major city), before continuing further on to Sheung Wan, which was a lot more interesting. It was similar to Causeway Bay in style, though not quite as insanely crowded, and again made us feel like we were truly in China! Unsurprisingly, after walking at least two miles (realistically you could probably double that, with all the climbing and backtracking involved in those stupid
walkways), we were starting to get ever so slightly tired and hungry, so we had a look around for some food...but as usually tends to be the case with me on the first night of a holiday, absolutely nothing took my fancy. John was not impressed!
We decided to just take the MTR back to the hotel, and grab something simple in one of the restaurants there, but as it turns out, that was easier said than done! We ended up leaving the MTR station out of the wrong exit, and we just had absolutely no clue where we were in relation to our hotel (one problem with Causeway Bay being such a crowded, compact area is that no map is able to include all of the little streets). We were wandering about for over an hour, passing the SOGO department store so many times that I even started to get very annoyed at the sight of the giant Maria Sharapova billboard sprawled across the store facade (and I love Masha, so that’s very unlike me!). Eventually, we figured out where we were, and were extremely annoyed to find that the hotel was literally a 30 second walk from
where we had exited the MTR from! Ooops! It was, however, a relief to see it even amongst the desperate flashes of irritation we were feeling, lol. We ended up at Cafe One inside the hotel, where I had the most refreshing glass of coke I’ve ever had in my life and a good old burger and chips (it’s fair to say we weren’t quite in the mood for anything adventurous!), which made me feel much better 😉 Before heading back to the room for the night, we checked the shops on the second floor of the hotel just to see if there was anything interesting, and ended up getting distracted in HMV...where I found the new Mariah album Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel!! 😊 It had been released worldwide in September, though for some reason the UK had to wait until November, which was making me very impatient. But there it was! 😊 And even more excitingly, there was a CD player in the room, so I was able to go and listen to it straight away. Yippee!
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Emilia
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First of all, you HAVE to have notes of some kind of each day, or else your memory is plain perfect :D! I loved going back a year and reading exactly what happened to you since you dropped me off at my hostel in Newcastle :). You were very active on your first day even if you'd barely had any sleep at all! Crazy! I don't know that I'd have been able to pull it off :D! Your description of Hong Kong matches my ideas of it...anyway, I'm still so happy about the Mariah CD, it was the perfect start to your honeymoon :).