BEHOLD: Hong Kong

The following is a brief (and long overdue) recap of my trip to Hong Kong.... which happened last month.

Another visa run was again necessary, both Melissa and I needed to flee the country and tickets to Hong Kong were among the cheaper options. Also, our little Mexican friend Melissa (or as I have affectionately nicknamed her- "Pinto") had been wanting to experience Hong Kong before she left Asia. She had less than a month left in Taiwan before she'd have to go back home to Tijuana. So we decided to make a 3 day trip of it, and since it was Chinese New Year- all three of us had time off work.

(*Note: Chinese New Year celebration lasts for about 10 days, think of Christmas, Thanksgiving, and 4th of July all packed into one holiday and you'd get Chinese New Year)

We arrived in Hong Kong in the evening and got to experience sitting in the top front seats of a double decker bus. They are all over Hong Kong, and they are DELUX. Hong Kong city looks amazing at night. There is some fantastic architecture and everything is lit up. We were also relieved to find that pretty much everyone knew how to speak English very well, which was a lifesaver because none of us speaks Cantonese. There's a notable British influence in Hong Kong. Entire districts with street names from England, and European looking buildings. And their accents are generally much more British than American when they speak English. Hong Kong is even more crowded than Taipei. It really felt like swimming up a thick stream of human beings everywhere we went.

Since it was a holiday we got to see light shows in the famous Victoria Harbor, live music, parades, dragon dances, junks motoring around the harbor with lanterns hanging from the rigging, etc. The weather wasn't fantastic, in fact it was absolutely freezing, and rained most of the time, but we still got to see quite a bit of the city. Unfortunately after being climatized economically by Taiwan (in other words become a total cheap-skate) Hong Kong seemed like it cost a fortune. We stayed in a janky little hostel in MongKok (Kowloon area), which was cheap. But everywhere we went were big fancy buildings, fancy cars, and more high end retail stores and restaurants than I've ever seen in one place. So that limited us to what we could do for fun. But we still enjoyed it. The trip went by very fast and before we knew it we were back in rainy Taipei.

Pfohtoes:

(I realized about 30 min. after arriving in Hong Kong that I left my camera at home, so all pictures were obtained by crummy phone cameras or Pinto's even crummier digital camera- which can't focus to save it's life. So pictures are slightly less fantastic than I would have liked. But oh well.. here they 'yar)

(I think you can click on the pictures to enlarge)