Hong Kong Day 1

Hong Kong

I can say that 7-eleven is VERY popular in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, they were on every street, it was bizarre!

So today, a decent sized group of people decided to head over to Hong Kong. First off, I can say that it’s not as easy as it sounds to just hop over to Hong Kong. It is treated as a completely separate territory/country as we had to go through both a China immigration and a Hong Kong immigration, so I got several more stamps in my passport, which was exciting!

We met in the hotel lobby at 12noon, and took off very soon after that.

We had to take several cabs to the train station, and our cab got lost or something and dropped us off in a weird place and then we couldn’t find anyone (and stupid me forgot my cell phone, so we couldn’t call anyone). We were just getting ready to give up and go back to the hotel when we decided to try one last thing, and lo and behold, we found our group!

So we went through Chinese immigration, then went through Hong Kong immigration. Then we had to take a train (much like metro north, nj transit, LIRR…) for what felt to be about 45 minutes, then we had to switch to a subway to get to our final destination.

By the time we finally saw anything that wasn’t the inside of a train, it was after 3pm!

We navigated our way through a part of Hong Kong (ok, I just followed the Hong Kong pros) and went up a multi-level escalator thing that was pretty cool! We ended up in a small diner-type restaurant called the Flying Pan.

I got a burger, which was excellent, and a cast mate got the burger too, but his was a massive one- double burger, with ALL the toppings. This burger must have been 6 inches thick!

Then, our group of about 15 or so split up into much smaller groups.

My small group did some traveling around HK. We went to a mall where we found $29 scoops of Ben and Jerrys, then walked along the river and took the ferry to the other side of the river and did some wandering there. And I bought a $62 version of UK’s Cosmo Magazine.

Then we met up with some other folks to see the HK skyline light show.

I was wearing my new Crocs because it was supposed to rain, and I bought them just for rain purposes. But by this point, my feet were ridiculously swollen and I had HUGE deep blisters all over my feet. I just wanted to sit down.

Good thing, because after the light show, we broke up and went in several directions for dinner. My group went to a FANTASTIC Indian restaurant called Gaylords. Fantastic. Granted, not my east village joint, but fantastic nonetheless.

And then we hopped on the trains and went back to Shenzhen.

Hong Kong is so much like New York. You could tell when you were crossing from China into Hong Kong. It was visibly cleaner, it had all of the same 5th Ave stores, everyone spoke english (everyone, all signs were in english, all ads, store names... english everywhere)...

Fantastic looking restaurants, though we only enjoyed the two.

It's a huge city, so I'm not sure how much one would get to see, a lot like NY, where you want to go to the touristy spots like midtown, times square, union square, lincoln center, statue of liberty, ellis island, etc. So I'm not sure what the Hong Kong equivalents of those are.

We are going back, so I'll be sure to post more!