Day 71 – Hong Kong

Friday, April 4th, 2008

Upon leaving the ship this morning we again tried to find somewhere to stay for the night. We first went to this internet café that is literally a 5 minute walk from the ship. This didn’t help us out much though since we don’t really know the streets and wanted something close to the harbor since we planned on taking the ferry to Shenzhen airport tomorrow morning. One thing we were able to accomplish here was confirming that our flight from Beijing to Shanghai was moved a few hours, giving us time to see the Great Wall on the last day. Despite the pain of using elong.net (where we got the tickets from) they were willing to change our flight for free, which was nice.

After giving up there we decided to find a hostel and check that out. The hostel that we found was in a building that had literally 30 other hostels in it. This was a big building, but the only thing in it was hostels. Kinda weird, but we decided to check it out and took an elevator to the 15th floor then work our way down. None of us have ever actually stayed in a hostel, and we were looking for somewhere for 9 people to sleep. Our main concern was that we wanted to have a safe place to drop off our bags for the night. One thing we did know was that we didn’t want to carry our bags around all night until we went to bed. So after checking a few floors out in this building (each floor had 4-5 hostels in it) we decided to check out the YMCA because David had heard that they have cheap rooms, and it was located only a few blocks away from the harbor that we were leaving from in the morning. Our final ultimatum was that if the YMCA was a bust, then we would come back here and book a room in one of these hostels. The YMCA is actually a really big hotel in HK. They still have floors with exercise equipment and pools and such, but the hotel takes up a majority of the building. They did (luckily) have room in a ‘family suite’ for the night. By this time we were all sick of walking around wasting precious time in HK trying to find a place to stay for the night, so we were all relieved once this was done.

After grabbing a quick bite to eat, we headed back over to Hong Kong island. David’s roommate, Kevin, was looking on a map the day we got to HK and found an intersection of two streets – Bowen Drive and Bowen Road. His last name is Bowen, so he really wanted to check it out. (rightfully so, if I found an intersection of Chapman and Chapman in a foreign country, I would definitely want to check it out). We picked up a taxi driver on HK island and showed him on the map where we wanted to go. This guy spoke very little English, so communication was kind of a problem. He either couldn’t figure out how to get to Bowen/Bowen or just didn’t want to drive down a certain street for some reason. So we ended up getting out of the taxi and walking. It was easy to see that the area was very wealthy. Nice landscaping, big houses with big, fenced yards, ect. The walk to Bowen/Bowen ended up being scenic as well, since it was located on the side of a large hill overlooking the city. I was able to get some good pictures from up there, but he fog still hasn’t lifted from the first day so you can’t see very far and the tops of some of the taller buildings are still covered. We did end up making it to the intersection of Bowen Road and Bowen Drive. Kevin had a nice photo shoot, probably took 100 or more pictures before we could leave.

Our next stop was ‘’The Peak’’ on HK island. Everyone there knows where the peak is, so we grabbed a taxi and just said ‘The Peak’ and he knew where to take us. It’s basically just the highest point on HK island overlooking the city. Which is great, except (like I told you before) it was still foggy so we didn’t have the best view. The peak is filled with tourists, but totally random and out of nowhere, I saw a guy wearing a Minnesota Twins jersey. Apparently he’s from Coon Rapids and is just visiting Hong Kong. That made me happy to see a Twins jersey on the complete opposite side of the world. Also made me a little sad that I missed the season opener. Oh well, I’ll just be sure to go next year, as long as I’m not in Hong Kong again ;)

After visiting The Peak we headed to try and find a good sushi place. Chris and Jim are pretty big Sushi fans. I’ve never actually had sushi, but I was willing to give it a try. This part of the world is suppose to have some of the best sushi in the world, so I figured this place is as good as any to try it. After trying to find a place that was recommended to us by some locals that we talked to at Bowen/Bowen we found it, and found out that they wanted like $10 per piece of sushi. It was a REALLY nice restaurant. No way we were going to eat there though so we left and found this little sushi bar across the street.

At the start of this trip, I had never seriously used chop sticks. This gave me quite the challenge when arriving in Hong Kong. I’m getting a lot better though! I can actually function and eat comfortably with only chop sticks. Noodles and rice are a little tricky still, but I get by. Haha. I’m not sure what kind of tea this place was serving, but it was possibly the best tea that I’ve ever had. I really should have asked them what kind it was or if they sold it.
After sushi we found ourselves a little crunched for time. We quickly headed back to the ship to meet up with Rachel, Rudy, and Todd who are coming to Beijing with us. We needed to tell them where we were staying for the night and tell them that they need to get ferry tickets to get to Shenzhen tomorrow. After a quick talk and quickly packing everything I needed, we headed to check into the hotel. Some of Rachel and Todd’s friends from Syracuse are studying abroad in Hong Kong so we met up with them before going out for the night. They showed us a nice strip of restaurants not too far away that we could sit down and get some food at and just chill.