Catching up #1: Hong Kong

It's been a while... We were fairly busy in Hong Kong, seeing the sites and just exploring the really interesting town. I posted on Beijing when we got there, but I didn't realize that once we left and returned to mainland China, blogger.com and blogspot.com would be 100% blocked (I assume by the Chinese firewall / censor). Interestingly I was able to keep up just barely on news of Nepal's elections and also the Tibet stuff through Google News. So some stuff (English at least) does get through. All the other news sites (major aggregators at least) were totally blocked. I could have read China Daily, but I mean...

Anyways, Hong Kong was a great, fun city. It is truly a crossroads of a lot of different cultures. We spent the first night in a laughably dingy hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui, the main tourist district. If for some reason you ever end up in Hong Kong, the Chungking Mansions and Mirador Mansions are the best deal in town but you probably don't really want to stay there even though they're mentioned in Lonely Planet. We moved a little further north from that area the next night and found a very nice, newly renovated place near the Jordan metro stop. It's nice to be just outside the chaos of Tsim Sha Tsui. We settled in there on the 30th and stayed in Hong Kong until the 4th of April.

It was 80 degrees when we landed, but most of the rest of the time we were there it was foggy though it didn't really rain. Our trip to Victoria Peak was a little of a let down because you couldn't see the famous panorama of the city, but the ride up at least was fun (and that is actually where we found Bubba Gump's).

We spent the vast majority of our time exploring the few little blocks that make up SoHo in Central Hong Kong. We celebrated Emilie's 26th birthday at a nice vegetarian place there the first night. SoHo is a really cool area near the mid-levels escalator (which is basically an escalator running up a steep - not like San Francisco - next to the street). Best of all there are a bunch of camera stores in the area, and I finally sucked it up and bought a tripod to take trekking out with us in Nepal and hopefully around in Africa. As Emilie can tell you, I pined for my tripod ever since I decided to leave it at home. I saved about 80 bucks by buying it in Hong Kong, and I'm 60% sure that it's not a fake... Just kidding, it's real. I think.

We wasted some time exploring other areas of the city including the really nice Victoria Park. Other than that, we took in a lot of happy hours (that run until 10 PM in Hong Kong at some places) and ate a lot of well... Gelato.

We did a day trip to Macau as well. It was actually a really cool city to see the Portuguese influenced architecture of the old city and visit the museum and St. Paul's ruins. We went into the Casino Lisboa, but despite severe desire to do otherwise, I didn't gamble. Other than the old sites we weren't interested in seeing much else and took the ferry back to Hong Kong around 5 PM.

Overall, I would say Hong Kong reminds me most of New York City in the US but with better public transportation. The subway there is unbelievable, especially the airport express service. We were definitely settling down into a routine of things to do by the time we left.

You can see some of our pictures of Hong Kong.

And pictures from Macau too.