Hong KongWritten by: SusanDate: April 10, 2008
Hong Kong is a city full of stimulation. Lights, people, shops, and traffic everywhere. It’s hard to be alone in Hong Kong and if you’re a person who needs “personal” space, it’s probably not the place for you. Unless of course you’ve got like millions of dollars and can afford your own penthouse suite. Most of us regular joes though end up staying in the cramped expensive quarters of Hong Kong. We were a bit apprehensive about our hostel since all we had heard were horror stories about how dingy, small, and skanky the hostels in Hong Kong are. It’s a big city where real estate is expensive and therefore every inch counts.
After an expensive 40 minute taxi ride form the airport which is on an island far, far away from the city we arrived in the center of it all. Our cab couldn’t drop us off right in front of our hostel so we had to walk with our backpacks, day packs, and wheelie (yes, we ended up having to buy yet another wheelie suitcase in China) and pushed our way through the streets of Hong Kong looking for our hostel. Luckily we were close and were only damp with sweat by the time we found it.
After checking into our tiny, tiny but very clean room we decided to go walk around.
We had heard Hong Kong was the mecca for all things electronics including any cell phone your little heart could desire. Brian was especially excited since he’s an electronics junkie. I, on the other hand, prefer a phone with 2 functions, making calls and having an alarm clock. Everybody was right as cell phone stores were everywhere. Hong Kongers (I made this term up) are obsessed with their cell phones. It’s all about style, how many functions, and how cool you look with your cell phone. For us, it was almost too much. It was hard to even begin to look at cellphones as there were literally thousands of cell phones on display. After deciding that we couldn’t handle cell phones anymore we moved onto ipods and cameras. It was quite fun looking at everything and doing some wishful thinking.
What we really wanted to buy was an SLR camera. Canon 40D to be quite exact. It was beautiful. It sang to us, it said buy me, buy me! If only we could afford it. We continue to look at it and try to find ways to justify the cost but so far we have come up with nothing. I guess it will have to wait until our next around the world trip.
There’s tons to do in Hong Kong if you love to shop and eat. There’s also tons of hiking and parks. For some reason, we weren’t getting into any of it. Maybe we were getting lazy and didn’t really feel like figuring out how to get to places. Maybe because it was hot and humid. Not unbearable, but we had just come from a cold country so the heat felt sweltering at times to us. So instead all we’ve done in the past week is wander around the streets of Hong Kong, checking out the shops, cleaning up our resumes, and sleeping in. Maybe that’s what we needed though before the final leg of our trip.
Today, just to get ourselves out of our neighborhood and do something a little different, we decided to take a bus ride…..plus it was cheap entertainment. There are tons of doubledecker buses here in Hong Kong and some of them are really nice and fancy looking. We hadn’t seen much of the city since we’d been taking the subway most of the week and I thought it might be fun just to cruise around on the bus and see other neighborhoods. So that’s exactly what we did. We stood at the bus stop and waited for one of the nicer, newer buses to pull up and we hopped on and rode it to the end. It was pretty uneventful but just nice to see different areas of Hong Kong. Our final stop was anticlimactic as it stopped in front of a retirement home complex and small shopping center. So we walked around for about 5 minutes and got back on the bus.
What we have enjoyed about Hong Kong is all the interesting street food. I love trying new types of food and Hong Kong definitely puts its best foot forward when it comes to street food. There are stalls that sell fried fish balls, tofu, squid, and anything else fried. Other stalls sell different varieties of snacks made out of waffle batter. Those are my favorite. That’s actually one of my favorite memories of Hong Kong when I was here in 2nd grade. There are other stalls that sell these fresh mango, coconut, fruit drinks with tapioca balls and jelly. They claim it’s healthy but I’m not so sure about that. What I do know is that they are really tasty.
We’ve also been lucky enough to find a really good dim sum place by our hostel. Dim Sum is a breakfast/ lunch time way of eating for many Cantonese people. It’s especially famous and good here in Hong Kong. Basically you sit down in a restaurant and these ladies push little carts around with little plates of food on them. It can be anything from steamed shrimp dumplings to bbq pork in a bun to chicken’s feet. Everything comes on little plates so that you have the opportunity to sample a variety of dishes. It’s one of my favorite ways of eating and Brian has begun to learn to appreciate and enjoy it as well.
Travel info on Hong Kong:
We stayed at the Dragon Inn Hostel: www.dragoninnhk.com. It was very conveniently located only a block off of the Mongkok metro stop.
Taking a cab from the airport to Mongkok costs us $300HK (about $36US).
We purchased an Octopus card for the Metro system for $150HK ($50 of that was a deposit for the card). It works for the metro system as well as the bus system which was a bonus for us.
There is a great street of cheap, local restaurants one block east of the Ladies Market in Mongkok.
Cookies are buy 3 get 3 free at Mrs. Fields under the Metro station at Mongkok after 10pm. Get there early as a line forms and people actually have order lists.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 10 April 2008 )
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Date: April 3, 2008Written by: Susan
We had 10 days left before we were due to fly out of Beijing to Hong Kong. Although we knew we wanted to spend a week in Beijing, we thought 10 days might be a bit too long. There were a few options and we decided that we would take the 11 hour overnight train from Xi’an to Pingyao, a town described in our guidebook as a quaint, old Chinese town that would melt even the most hardened of expats. Sounded good to us. We were ready for a smaller town and a few days to just wander aimlessly.
After an 11 hour train ride on which we barely slept, we were thankfully greeted by our hostel. Hostels in China have been the nicest and cleanest that we’ve experienced so far on our trip. To be quite honest, they can barely be called hostels they tend to be so nice and clean. I digress….back to our hostel picking us up. It was freezing cold, possibly because it was 6am but I think more so because a cold front had passed through with some freezing rain. It was the coldest weather we had experienced so far in China.
After sitting in a nice warm front room waiting for our room to be cleaned, we had breakfast. Sometimes it’s hit or miss when it comes to places making western food. It said on the menu that they had pancakes, which are always a favorite of mine. Brian ordered apple pancakes and I ordered banana. The pancakes looked awesome when the came out except for the fact that there was no syrup (they gave us thin honey as a substitute) and that they tasted like fried garlic and onions. Clearly, they wipe down their pans here and cook not only pancakes, but Chinese food in them. Besides the fact that Brian’s did not taste like apple at all and mine only carried a hint of banana. Needless to say, I stuck with fried eggs the rest of our time at the hostel.
Pingyao is a town where there isn’t much to do except wander aimlessly around the streets looking at the old architecture and all the crap shops lining the main streets. It’s one of the most well-preserved ancient towns in China and therefore gets the Chinese tour groups visiting in hordes. After checking out most of the shops on our first afternoon, we still had two days to kill before our overnight train to Beijing.
There was a sign up in our hostel that had various services available including massages, acupuncture, foot massages, Chinese cupping, etc. Perfect we thought. We have nothing to do and we should take advantage of the low prices of massages because the prices will be steep from here on out. On the first night we each got a foot massage. First they soaked our feet in some sort of brown Chinese medicine that we felt did absolutely nothing and than began the massage. Brian said his massage was really nice and not too painful. Mine on the other hand almost left me screaming at points. We’ve noticed that in Asia, there have been many a times when the masseuse thinks hard means good and beats the living crap out of our feet.
The next day we decided to try cupping. We’d both never done it before and it sounded intriguing. Plus, it was only going to cost us about $10 and how could we say no? So the big selling point here is that the doctor (cupping is actually a medical treatment) comes to your room to administer the treatment. Essentially you lie on your stomach with your shirt off. He finds pressure points (similar to the ones in acupuncture) and puts a small glass jar near the area, lights a flame and quickly puts the glass jar on your skin. The jar suctions your skin and is supposed to help draw our impurities and ciriculate your blood. He repeats the process all over your back. Most of the time it just feels like something is pinching your skin. He continues to do this and moves the jars onto different points of your back. This process goes on for about half an hour. Afterwards, you pretty much looked like you just got into a major brawl with the vacuum cleaner and you didn’t win. It’s not pretty.
We can’t exactly say we felt renewed, rejuvenated or even relaxed after the experience. The only thing we really could do was compare our war wounds and decide who looked worse. On to the next treatment………
Day 2 brought us acupuncture and massages. We’d both never done acupuncture before and it somehow seemed appropriate considering we were in a small ancient Chinese village with nothing else to do. Again, it was the same doctor who had given us our cupping treatment but this time he came with his assistant. Acupuncture was a bit intimidating to us as they actually stick needles in you. We had heard though that it’s not supposed to hurt….and it didn’t exactly….except for when you tried to move your arm. We had 5 needles in us. 1 on the top of our head, 1 near our elbow, and the other near our wrist. The one on the head felt like nothing but the two on our arms were hitting pressure points that were really painful if we tried to move our hands. It was if our arms were these dead weights. To be honest, after about 5 minutes I wanted the whole experience to be over. I didn’t really like it and it kind of freaked me out. Instead I just laid there for 30 minutes with needles in my body.
The massage afterwards was anti-climatic and not very good considering the lady just rubbed our bodies with all of our clothes on. It felt more like we were getting chafed skin than a good rub down. Oh well….only another $14 down the tube but hey, at least we can check off acupuncture and cupping from our list.
After a not so refreshing several days of treatments, we were ready to head to Beijing and begin the last part of our journey here in China.
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