Shopping Nation

Trip Start Oct 20, 2008
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25
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Trip End Feb 02, 2009


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Flag of China  ,
Thursday, January 15, 2009

By now you've read Aidess' post on Beijing and all the amazing things we saw there, including all of the shopping.  At one point in Beijing Aidess said to me "I've never seen this many malls and high-end shops anywhere in my life."  Then we came to Hong Kong.  Hong Kong puts Beijing to shame when it comes to shopping.  There's no Great Wall here, no Forbidden City or Summer Palace.  True, there's a massive sitting Buddha and Hong Kong Disneyland, and I think a Nature Preserve hidden somewhere, but truly, you could think of Hong Kong as one giant mall.  There are outdoor shopping streets, indoor mall conglomerations (Harbor City is a connection of three different malls: Ocean Centre, Ocean Terminal, and Gateway Arcade, merged into one super-uber-mall), every high-end name brand you could imagine.  There are restaurants galore.  Just in one mall there were six Michelin-rated restaurants.  Oddly enough with all these shops it took us a good hour to find an Internet cafe.  They seem to have forgotten to put those in.  But you can buy just about anything and everything here.  One catch -- it may be duty-free, but it sure ain't cheap.  I guess there are hundreds of outlets here, too, but we haven't found those yet.

Our guesthouse is unfortunately very small.  We were spoiled with a nicer hotel in Beijing.  Now our room looks like a bathroom with tiled walls, and our bathroom is so small that the sink is in the shower... (Aidess continues) --No, really, we laughed so hard when we saw our bathroom stall. It's not even a "bathroom" its more of a stall in the corner of the room. In the very least our room is clean, quiet, and it doesn't smell. Its amazing what we now consider acceptable accomodations since we started our travels; the same goes for "clean". Really, "clean" is a very very relative concept.

As Ernie said, the abundance of restaraunts here is mind blowing...so ask us where we ate last night? Pizza Hut; Ernie's idea. To be fair, it was a very very fancy Pizza Hut. Imagine PF Chang decor (dark furniture, wood, dim lighting, etc). It took us a full 10 minutes to order as there was so much to choose from. Blue mussels, Norwegian smoked salmon, Parma ham, were just a few of our many choices. We ended up ordering a sampler appetizer (samosa, baked crab sesame toast, fish nuggets, potato wedges), I had a Norwegian smoked salmon with fruit salad, and Ernie had a Parma ham pizza. It was okay, but we did it just for the sheer novelty of it.
That was dinner, but for lunch, we had an equally interesting meal. Ernie had cold pigeon in plum wine sauce and I had a more tame fare of dumplings and bao. Ernie is quite the pigeon eater! His fare was very yummy and he like it a lot. Today we are off to 2 Michlin restaraunts, one for lunch and one for dinner. Hope its yummy!
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