Hong Kong Arrival
Trip Start
Apr 06, 2007
1
49
110
Trip End
Jul 23, 2007
KOWLOON,
Hong Kong
Saturday, May 19, 2007
After an action-packed morning full of blogging and packing, we set off for the Beijing airport. The hostel had given us a card with a map to the airport shuttle pick-up....it was fairly accurate but when we got to what we thought was the correct location, we could not see anything resembling a bus stop. Panning left, we saw several bus stops on the opposite corner - so we figured that MUST be the right area. When we got there, we tried to ask some locals who seemed to be carrying luggage as well (seemed like similar travelers....) they gave us the standard Chinese look of "I have no idea what you crazy Americans are talking about - please leave me alone". We then found a good Samaritan who pointed to a completely different area in the total opposite direction and said he thought the bus stop was over there. I surveyed his "confidence level", rejected his advice, and promptly walked over to the Beijing International Hotel (key word - INTERNATIONAL) to ask their advice
01 - the "courtyard" of our hotel building
. Fortunately, their concierge understood what we needed, and pointed us in the right direction. So we finally made it to the pick up spot - thank God we had left extra time. While waiting, we met an Aussie guy just as frustrated as we were in finding this stop. We continued talking throughout the shuttle ride and we found out that he had been a tour guide all over the world, including African and South American safaris. Pretty cool. He had recently quit his last job as a tour guide but seems to have a T-shirt business on the side in Australia. He told us all about his problems with Indian factories and how the Chinese factories were more reliable. He was pretty interesting overall, and gave us some good tips for Thailand. Andrea: Anyways, the real fun didn't start until we got to the Beijing airport. Remember how I explained earlier how the Chinese do not understand the concept of lines? Yeah, well imagine an airport without lines. Imagine waiting to check in to your flight and check your baggage, and the Chinese people behind you are blatantly trying to pass you in line. And it WAS a line - there were posts and ropes and the whole bit. The men behind us were so close you could feel the hair on their arms against your skin. I tried to block their path with my backpack, but they just kept creeping closer and closer. Finally, when we made it to the counter, they were literally RIGHT BEHIND US
02
. There was a yellow line drawn on the floor that people are supposed to stay behind while you are being helped - these people did NOT understand this concept. I got to the point where I was getting so claustrophobic I wanted to turn around and scream at them all. At one point, the luggage belt broke, and we were at a standstill waiting for it to come back on again - and the two Chinese men behind us (two different parties of people) both started waving their passports frantically in front of us. At this point, I got upset and turned around and tried to shoo them back. They ignored me. They also ignored the people behind the desk trying to usher them back as well. All in all, I wanted to kill them. All of them. Jose: Andrea's explanation is very good, but it is only one sided because she was only boxing out her half of the line. Although she is a very good boxer outer - many years of basketball have paid off! Anyways, on my half of the line, when we first got into the line, there was no one behind us. Then came a string of about six Chinese people - in about 2 or three different parties (it was hard to tell). Instantly, I realized what was going on. Since the guys in front of us were Australian, and us being civilized Americans, we were all just standing in line as in any normal airport. We had a good foot and half between us. This little old lady, she had to have been at least 70, took one look at that foot and a half, and decided it was hers
03 - Nathan Street, Kowloon at night
. As soon as I saw her begin to make her move, I kicked my bag that had been on the floor in front of me to the side as a BARRIER. She was not happy about the newly imposed hurdle on her way to HER foot and a half in front of me. She then decided she'd lean over the bag to see if it was possible to step over. At this point I decided to lean over gently, as I was at least EASILY twice her size, to demonstrate my ownership of this foot and a half of space. You would have thought she would have given up right there. But since it took us a good 20 minutes to get to the front of the line, she continuously looked left then right trying to see if it was possible to get by me. The final straw came when I actually reached the front of the line. She decided to stand NEXT to me. AT THE COUNTER. And see if her small 4 foot frame could reach her passport in farther than my hand could to the teller. She was quite upset when she was denied. And could not understand what was taking so long. As if it was my fault! Anyways, the reason it took 20 minutes was not only that the tellers don't care if you make it or not to your flight, but rather they FORGOT to put a tag on one of the Australian's bags that they had already sent down the chute!!! The Australians were not so happy to figure this out. The way they found out is the Chinese teller lifted up a luggage tag and had a look of "oops!" on his face!!! He wasn't too worried though - it wasn't his bag! He then told the Australians not to worry - they'd take care of it.
04 - Jose's Coke cans of the world....
Mind you, the teller didn't move, call anyone, or do anything out of the ordinary. We're still wondering if the poor Australian got his bag....So once we survived our "boxing out" experience...we were instructed to take our normal sized bags to the "over-sized" bag counter, because by this time, the luggage belt had been shut down and the people behind us were so aggressive and pushy, the teller just wanted to help us get out of there quickly, because we were slowly being pushed away from the desk, and the poor teller was swamped with passports waving in his face. Overall, the craziest airport experience to date.
So then we decided to grab lunch, because at this point we were starving. (Boxing out is tiring!) Little did we know that the Chinese government has a monopoly on airport restaurants, and the food prices were about 10 times what we had been paying in Beijing for the past week. And I'm not exaggerating, ten times is accurate. The prices were expensive even for AMERICAN airports! We went in the "western food" line and bought two funky BLTs and Cokes and paid about $40 US. This is about $320 RMB - which is INSANE. We paid, for a five course meal the night before about $50 RMB. You do the math. What a rip off. Starving people will do anything for food.
The flight was uneventful, we were disappointed with the absence of all you can watch movies and video games....but I guess we're back to reality now. We ended up circling over the Hong Kong airport for about 45 minutes due to airport congestion. When we finally touched down, we made friends with some women from MICHIGAN. Andrea: Actually, we learned that they were Yoopers....
05 - Andrea loves Chinese Tea!
. but they were very nice and had been to Hong Kong before and gave us lots of good information.We took a very convenient bus to the hostel we had booked. As soon as we got off the bus, we were immediately hounded by about five Indian men. They all had something - hotel, guest house, copy watch, copy bag, they spoke a mile a minute selling us something. We kept refusing, trying to ignore them, only to be hounded continuously by them and others down the street. It is definitely the most annoying part of Hong Kong.... We will be hearing "you want copy bag? copy watch? In our sleep for the next few weeks!! After asking several people about our hotel, we finally figured out that it was on the 13th floor of a huge building, full of retail stalls on the ground floor. On the way to the elevator, we passed Indian, African, Asian, and Western people. I definitely feel like Hong Kong is the most international city we have been in thus far. You can find EVERY nationality here.
Anyways, the elevator was quite exciting. There were four groups of people when we arrived, waiting for the elevators. And since there were four elevators, this seemed perfectly normal. But as soon as the first elevator arrived and only two people got in, I figured something had to be up
06 - A Desert Eagle speical for Johnny....
. That's when I figured out that each elevator only goes to 4 floors. But not four consecutive floors. For example, our elevator goes to floors 5, 9, 13. and Ground (obviously). Very interesting way of splitting it up. I've definitely convinced that this is a better system. First of all, there is almost always an elevator at the ground floor. Secondly, the elevator to the 13th floor is very quick, even though its so many floors....but because it skips so many floors, the speed is much better. We also figured out that we can take the elevator that goes to the 12th or 14th and take the stairs one flight for added efficiency. It really does work out well. But anyways, back to the hostel. Andrea wants to sue them for false advertising. Andrea: when we had booked the hostel originally, we thought it was an AMAZING deal. A Double room with ensuite bathroom, hot water, free wireless internet, completely refurbished rooms with brand new everything. The pictures looked amazing and the price was ridiculously cheap for Hong Kong, which is very expensive. No such luck. Jose: So we peered out of the elevator only to see an Indian gentleman sitting on a chair outside a room and above his doorway said "something something GuestHouse". I asked him about our hotel and he made kind of a snake motion with his hand, which I finally figured out to be around a couple of corners. We passed several tailor factories - basically rooms full of men sewing and putting together suits
07 - the Hong Kong sportsbar
! The building is shaped like a square with an empty inner square (kind of like a courtyard, but this place is not anywhere clean enough to be called a courtyard). We could see the A/C vents on windows of places across from us, and trust me, it did not look pretty. We took pictures - see attached. When we finally arrived at the check in desk, we were first told that we could "upgrade" our room for 50% more than what we had reserved. Mind you, we thought we had booked the nicest room available. So we were quite confused. We said no, we just wanted to see our room. And that's when they took us to our closet. It was about Tokyo sized (remember the bunkbeds?), only instead of drywall, we now have bathroom grade tile on the walls, and the bathroom that it comes with is about four feet by two feet and that includes a toilet and a multi-functional sink with a shower head. Luckily there is a drain also in there. Also, no windows in the room. It really is a closet. Fortunately, it does have a good, working A/C and fan, so its not horrible, but it definitely does not anywhere resemble the pictures of what we thought we had booked. Also - no free internet and no wi-fi. Later we discovered that the showerhead was broken. Just to add insult to injury. And we had to watch the check-in lady fuddle around with the shower head for about an hour. Pictures attached. Anyways, after dropping our bags, we headed off to find some dinner
08
. We found a surprisingly clean, cheap, and quite tasty Chinese-ish restaurant. It was kind of like fast food, but at least we were waited on. The dim-sum was amazing and we also had a very good chicken dish. Andrea is officially addicted to milk tea - I don't know what it is, but she likes it. After dinner, we headed off to the "gentleman's market", which the Yooper women had told us about. Funny enough, we ran into the same women on the way! The market runs every night until midnight, and is a huge street market full of vendors selling lots of cheap shit. And I do mean Shit. Mostly fake watches, bags, and clothes, including plastic belts with the words "genuine leather" inscribed everywhere on them. We didn't get there until about 11:30, so many of the stalls were closed down by the time we arrived. The overall "hong kong scene" appears to be dirty. And we thought Beijing was bad - Hong Kong is way worse. I'll take Beijing any day - even Andrea agrees with that. The vendors also did not want to bargain very much, or even try hard to sell you anything. The most effort that they put into it was yelling "copy bag? copy watch? At you as you passed. After that, they didn't really care. After cruising the market, we then headed off to find Murphy's, an Irish pub we had seen from the bus. Unfortunately, we never found it. We did find a building full of fun clubs and bars - we had our choice - there was one on every floor! We started at the top, but after about 4 stops, we finally ended up at a sportsbar/karaoke bar which was absolutley packed! Everyone was watching the Manchester United game on the big screens. It would have been fun, but no one was very friendly and the drinks were ridiculously expensive. So we headed off again in search of Murphy's....no such luck. And then it started to rain. So, we took a cab (expensive) back to the hostel, and headed to bed.
Good night everyone!
Love,
Jose and Andrea
