Hong Kong... the city of electricity

  Hong Kong, China
Friday, March 21, 2008

Sometimes while I'm traveling I can't help but be overwhelmed at just how big our world. Then other times, I

drinking beers in downtown

can't believe it's so freaking small. As I'm checking into my hostel (I use the term hostel very lightly by the way, it was more like a dilapidated tenament in the middle of downtown Hong Kong), I heard a familiar voice coming from down the hall. 'I'm in Hong Kong, no way it's a familiar voice,' I think, and dismiss the thought.

lines for louis vuitton

But sure enough, as soon as I look up I see two guys I knew living in New Zealand. Unbelievable. And it was as easy as that, within minutes of getting into Hong Kong, I had already found myself some fantastic travel and drinking buddies.

Nick and Feddy had just gotten there as well, so as soon as we all dropped our stuff off, we headed out into town. How do I describe Hong Kong? I'd say it's probably the most expensive city in the world to shop in. On any

waiting for the lightshow to start

given block, you'll find designer store after designer store... I think the cheapest item you could buy on our block was a $600 wallet from Armani. The Louis Vuitton store took the prize though, with massives lines just to get in and browse. It only took a little while to realize that there was absolutely nothing in our price range on our side of Hong Kong,

ferry trip around hong kong

so we decided to check out the other island. Hong Kong is actually separate islands, made up of Kowloon- the shopping district where we were staying, and Hong Kong island- the concrete jungle of massive office buildings. I'm not giving it enough credit, though. We spent a whole day just walking around Hong Kong island, the architecture was really out of this world.

the light show

Unfortunately it was pretty foggy and cloudy the whole time so I didn't get too many pictures of the buildings, but if you were lucky enough to get a postcard you'd get the idea...! We basically just walked around during the days, took a ferry tour of the islands and explored the side markets.

Every night we started off at the world-famous lightshow. It's pretty cool, basically all of the office buildings in

more light show

Hong Kong island have gotten together and organized a nightly show of music and lights. You stand at the waters edge of the Kowloon side and at precisely 8pm music comes on from the various speakers and the lights across the water begin to dance in sync with the music. The whole thing lasts about ten minutes and it really didn't get old... I don't even want to imagine how much electricity it uses up, but we enjoyed it! After the lightshow we would make our way over to the night market, making sure to stop off at a 7/11 along the way to purchase the super cheap pbr's. Yes, they have pbr in Hong Kong, and not only that, but it was $1.25 for a LITER of it. And yes, it comes in liters.

again, drinking beers in downtown

So that was Hong Kong in a nutshell, pbr, lights, and office buildings. It was a blast, for sure, but honestly, I never once got the impression that we were in China (besides the Chinese, of course). There were more American chains than local restaurants and there were more European clothing stores than anything else you'd find in China. But we had fun, and that's what matters :)