First Trip to Hong Kong

  Hong Kong, China
Saturday, June 7, 2008

This past weekend we made our first trip to Hong Kong. As I mentioned in earlier posts, we have to go into Hong Kong once every 30 days to "renew" our visas. We were prodding Mike to make the trip with us, since he is much more familiar with the city than us, but he hates going down into such a huge city. He finally caved and said he would bring Xiao Li along with him. We started our trip with breakfast at the Time Coffee restaurant at 9 AM.

Beginning of the trip in Qing Xi

From there we drove to Shenzhen in Mikes car. There was quite a bit of rain, but when we arrived in Hong Kong we found out that we missed the largest portion of the storm. The papers said that Hong Kong received 17 inches of rain in just under 10 hours. There was video of cars up to their hoods in water. The only signs of this flooding when we arrived were shops that had all their carpet ripped out and on the sidewalk.

Navigating into the train station in Shenzhen is always a chore and if it wasn't for Mikes exceptional chinese driving skills, we would have been there much later than we were. We finally got into the train station and had to go through the customs process. There was a small issue with Xiao Li going through customs getting out of China. She had to get a hold of a travel agency that acted as her guide to get her through and from there on we didn't have any problems. Once through China customs, we had to go through one final customs line to get into Hong Kong. From there we bought four first class train tickets for the one hour train ride into Hong Kong. First class gets you a guaranteed seat and a much more comfortable car.

Train from Shenzhen to Hong Kong

The train took us to a station right by the hotel we would be staying in. The Sheraton Hong Kong is the hotel that most of the people from Graco stay at and it was very nice. We were able to get a harbor view room.

Our room at the Sheraton

A soft bed finally

The room was smaller than our big place in Qing Xi, but they did a great job with making the best of the space. The bed was extremely comfortable and the shower had two shower heads that felt like they were dumping buckets of water on you.

After quickly dropping off our stuff, we got out onto the streets and starting walking around one of the main shopping areas. This area of Hong Kong has many of the high end stores like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, etc...And they also have more knock off stands/stores than you could imagine. People are constantly saying "copy watch, copy bag, tailor, CD, DVD" to you as you walk down the side walk. The shopping scene got to be annoying rather quickly and the fact that we were hungry didn't help. We were convinced to come into this Indian/Malaysian/Thai restaurant by another guy on the sidewalk trying to drum up business. It wound up being a great meal where we had some Indian beers and some really good food. It definitely wasn't the cheapest lunch we've ever had, actually it was by far the most expensive lunch I've ever seen for 4 people.

After lunch we continued to walk around and shop.

Shopping area

Massive tree in front of shops

Group photo while shopping

After a stop at the hotel for a bathroom break and to drop off what Mike had purchased we walked down to "star walk" which is similar to the place back home that has all the stars and their hand prints are...neither of us can think of the name of that place right now, maybe walk of fame??...

Picture by the bay

Ship in the bay

Liz in her fancy rain coat

From there we took a ferry across the harbor over the Wan Chai area. This is the area where all the flooding was, but we had no idea that it had happened until we saw some video on the TV while waiting for the boat. As I said before, there was no serious devistation and people were trying to clean up their shops. The area where we were walking around wound up being a whole bunch of home decoration and renovation stores, so there wasn't much to look at. The reason for us going over to this part of town was based on the manager at the "Spice Restaurant" that we ate lunch at. She told us there would be an American style band at this one bar in Wan Chai and it would be a good time. Well, we finally made it to that bar and it was very small and the people were pretty rude to us. The rude personalities were something that we encountered quite a bit in Hong Kong, but I guess you will have that in any big city. Once again we were getting hungry and decisions were becoming tedious, so we decided we wanted to eat dim sum for dinner but we couldn't find a place that had those little carts that they push around and you pick the dishes you want. We actually wound up in a somewhat fancy restaurant that had half way decent food.

Random restaurant we ata at

However, our disappointment in them not having Dim Sum carts and the lack of hospitality that we are used to in Chinese restaurants gave us a negative attitude and were in and out of there before we knew it.

From there we weren't very sure on where we were going to head next. Mike wanted to get up into Lang Kuai Fang (an area up on a huge hill that has all kinds of nightlife and restaurants)...but we were considering sticking round Wan Chai to see how things turned out there...Liz said, "lets go to that place you want to check out Mike" and it wasn't 10 seconds until we were in a cab on our way to this bar Mike has been to that has great live music. The cab ride was actually pretty fun, with a lot of steep hills and the fact that they drive on the wrong side of the road is hard to comprehend sometimes. The bar Mike wanted to go to was a bar that I went to with some college buddies during our trip in 2003...the bar that was sort of open air and somewhat of a spanish/european design. The band wasn't as lively as Mike remembered, but we still had a great time. The bar was full of foreigners and we found ourselves being overly critical of the overweight people and we wanted to be back in China where we were the specticle and receiving all the attention.

The next day we got up around 9 and met Mike and Xiao Li in the lobby and headed to Starbucks for breakfast. You may be thinking, you were in Hong Kong and you ate at Starbucks and just winged it on your dinner?? Well, Hong Kong is a place that I feel doesn't have the culture of China and it is a little too big for my liking. We were trying to do everything as easily/quickly as possible, so we could move on to the next part of our trip.

Sunday was the Dragon Boat Festival and we were hoping to see some of it. The Dragon Boat Festival is a huge event that involves these decorated canoes that are used for racing in one of the harbors nearly Stanley Market. They actually bury the boats in the sand every year after the race, i am assuming to preserve them for the following year when they begin to train again. In order to get to Stanley Market, you have to take an hour long double decker bus ride along the coast on these ridiculously narrow roads. We were able to get in the second row of seats and the ride was a lot of fun.

Hole in the building Fen Shui

We got to see this building that has a hole in the center of it, for Feng Shui...the thought is that the Dragons can fly down from the hill and pass through the building...this was according to some guy on the bus, who knows if it is a true myth or not. Upon arriving in Stanley Market, we realized that it was an extremely hot day and Liz immediately became a sunglass model.

Sunglass Model

The Stanley Market area has really developed since the last time I was there in college. There are a lot of cool restaurants right on the water and the shopping area has expanded a little bit. Stanley market is basically a huge area of knock offs, chinese knick-knacks and art vendors. It's very easy to spend hours in this market, looking through all the stores and negotiating with the sales people. We were getting a little frustrated with the crowd, so we knew it was time to eat. We found a dim sum place that still didn't have the carts, but they had some really good food and it was the perfect meal to get us through the day. After lunch we continued to walk around and shop and we were always looking for this Dragon Boat Festival. We were right on the water and didn't see any sign of these boats. We finished up our shopping and went on a quest to find this huge event. We were seeing people walking around in these goofy outfits and soaking wet all day. We finally followed the crowd/asked around and we found the main event.

Busy Dragon Boat Festival

One of the final Dragon Boat Races

We watched one race and got the idea of what all the fuss was about and then headed back to the bus for our trip back to the hotel. It was a longer bus ride this time, because we didn't go to the bus station, we went directly to the hotel. Upon walking to the hotel, we saw Pizza Hut and we had to have it. This was by far the fanciest Pizza Hut we have ever seen.

Pizza Hut in Hong Kong

Fanciest Pizza Hut on Earth

All of our mouths were watering

Mike got thin crust meat lovers and Liz and I got the traditional pan pizza. It was just as good as home and it was one of the few meals that made us truly feel full like you get back home...not something that we were looking to have happen, but we had to get as much of that goodness into us as possible.

After our feast we got onto the train back up into Shenzhen and then made it back through customs without a problem.

Overall, the trip was enjoyable. For our next trip down there, we will definitely have an itinerary on where were want to go and what restaurants we want to check out. The winging it thing is fun, but can be stressful at times. We are looking forward to going back for another overnight trip. We are not very good at buying things for other people or even for ourselves. We will do our best to get together a list of things we think might be cool to bring back and be sure to get something meaningful for our friends and family.