Hong Kong. Personal space? No thanks...

Greetings and salutations...

We are actually currently in Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam and are having a fine time, but please let me tell you about our time in Hong Kong. Ahhthankyou...

So we arrived in Hong Kong during the evening on the 6th of Friday. Our total travel time from Manila to Hong Kong was about 8 hours, this puts our running total of travel time at approximately 51.75 hours, yes we are keeping track. Transportation was a piece of cake using HK's MTR system. Once we got to the hotel we decided to grab a bite to eat.

We were dying for a bit of HK culture so we went to a Mexican restaurant :) It was three things...Delicious, Expensive, and in the middle of many adult themed establishments. eeeek. We had found the restaurant in a travel book and we had no idea of the neighborhood it was in until we poked up from the subway and we were surrounded. It was no problem however as none of the establishments were at all interested in a married couple walking together :)

The next day we got a decently early start grabbed some breakfast and headed for Victoria Peak. We took a tram to the top of the peak. The tram rides up very steeply and it reminded me of the upward ascent for the first peak on a roller coaster (I hate roller coasters). Needless to say I was waiting for the accelerating clicking sound and the sudden unstoppable pull of gravity. We survived. Actually the tram ride was very pleasant and I felt completely safe the whole time, however, it was steep. The view from the top was well worth it. The city of HK is certainly not a prototypical location for a city. Sky scrapers are either built on the side of steep hills, on reclaimed land right next to the water or in the small space between these two.

After this we trekked over to the mid levels. The mid levels is a neighborhood/district of HK learn more here, at wikipedia of course. The unique feature of the area is the worlds longest escalator or at least string of escalators going up the central area. In total they cover a distance of 800 m (Thats a little more than 2,600 feet America) which is a long way to travel on an escalator. It is actually used for transportation and switches its direction of operation depending on the movement of the masses (morning/afternoon rush hours). We stopped for lunch at a little place called Classified. It was a wine and cheese bar, which we enjoyed minus the wine. We took advantage of the create your own cheese plate and tried a dry/soft/bleu cheese which we got to pick from the walk in cheese cooler. It was all delicious. After that we headed for Cat Street which is a local market full of souvenirs. We were told that the markets in this area were prime for bartering, as in don't settle for anything more then 50% of the first price offered. We didn't have too much success as the locals seemed pretty stingy and we ended up leaving without to many purchases.

After the market we headed for the Ferry station and hopped on a boat across the harbor to Tsin Sha Tsui. This was an extremely packed place. Full of shopping malls and of course people. Many areas of Hong Kong are packed with people whether its the sidewalks, the subway system, or stores. People, people, people. If you really like that 2.5 ft that is usually empty on all sides of you then HK is not the place for you. If you do like that just hope that the person behind you on the train brushed his teeth because when you can feel him breathing down your neck, literally not figuratively, you can certainly smell if he had fruit loops or cocoa crisp that morning.

Later that night we headed for the Harborside intercontinential to grab some appetizers and a view of the Hong Kong light show. Starting at about 8 PM many buildings on the HK skyline take part in a coordinated light show. It was!!!...Underwhelming. Having seen some pictures of the show at it's wildest I think Lauren and I were ready for a combination of 4th of July and New Years on the side of buildings. Instead we got a more tame version, which wasn't nearly as quick or bright as we were expecting. All that being said, if we knew nothing about the light show and the buildings suddenly started doing what we saw we probably would have been utterly amazed.

After the light show we met up with Lauren's old young life leader Kat and her husband Dan. They brought us to a delightful Spanish Tapas restaurant and we enjoyed some food and some mutual feelings on life in HK compared to life in the states.

Sunday was a bit more of a casual day. We started the day in an area called causeway bay which we found to be far too crowded and we quickly headed for our turbo ferry ride to the "Las Vegas of the East", Macau. We arrived in Macau in the early afternoon and had some down time before heading out for dinner. We ate at a fantastic little Italian restaurant with the sights of all the casinos right outside our window. Afterwards Lauren and I decided to try our luck at the MGM Grand. We were lucky indeed as we walked through the casino without betting or spending a dime. Ha Haaa as a friend of mine would say, and you know who you are. We headed back to the hotel in anticipation of an early morning and long day of travel the next day...we had no idea what was coming...more on that in the next post.

So long from Vietnam!