I’m back! We had such a lovely trip these past couple of weeks. I’m going to post about our trip to Hong Kong and then after I’ll do a separate post about our Japan leg. I took over 1000 photos and several videos on my little canon camera to document all of the awesome experiences we had together.
Our journey started on November 12, where we got on a jet plane bound for Hong Kong International airport. The ride was a long one, fourteen agonizing hours in our seats. We sat on the left side of the plane where we had a guy on the aisle seat that seemed to sleep really well throughout the trip. He was probably a seasoned Hong Kong traveler or something, because he blocked me into my seat for hours on end. I was so antsy and kept having to wake him up to let me out for a walk or a bathroom break. We were lucky though, because my parents have United Premier Executive status so we were able to upgrade to those economy plus seats, giving us a bit more leg room. Hey, at least I wasn’t that guy who sat in the seat NEXT to the bathrooms. Talk about disgusting bathroom spray and foot traffic.
We survived the long ride to arrive in Hong Kong and quickly went through immigration and customs. After that, we were on our way to the main city! Ahh it felt so good to be off the plane. We arrived around dinner time in Hong Kong and we were all tired and zombie like. My hubby and I checked into our hotel and I immediately took a shower to clean airplane grime off me. After that we were off to dinner! We didn’t want to waste any time with silly stuff like sleep and rest and needed some good food in us. My brother, who just moved to Hong Kong about six months earlier, met us at our hotel to hang out. He took us to this cafe where we had our first meal of deliciousness. Check out the photos below:
Oh, I forgot to mention that my parents were with us on our vacation in Hong Kong. They are frequent visitors to this bustling city so we were relying on them to help us get around. This made things a lot easier. Wait until I post about Japan in my next post. It was quite the adventure. Anyhow back to Hong Kong…
For those of you who haven’t visited this great city, part of the culture here seems to mostly revolve around food. My parents have friends here, and of course my brother lives here. Not only that, my two aunts from the Bay Area were in town visiting as well. When people get together here to visit one another, its usually over a meal. Its probably the case in a lot of other cultures, but to me, it seems really extreme here. I would have at a minimum 3 meals, but it was more like 5 meals a day. My pants got tighter, and somehow my shirts wouldn’t stay on around my stomach anymore. I’m going to post a few pictures of the meals we ate. I have to mention that the food was SO GOOD in Hong Kong. Its just a big metropolis full of local eateries that serve anything you could think of, asian and non asian cuisine. Maybe I’ll convince some of you readers to make your pilgrimage to Hong Kong one day to sample just a small part of the delicious food. It really can’t be matched back home in the US of A.
What else did I do besides eating my way through the vacation? Well we did a ton of cool things during this 8 day excursion. We went to the Big Buddha in the outskirts of Hong Kong, by the airport. I’ve been to this site before, but because my husband has not, we had to make a trip for him. When I went to the site of the Big Buddha with my dad, they only had buses to transport you from the subway station, which took almost an hour. Now, they have turned this Big Buddha site into a big tourist attraction. There is an aerial tramway to get to the tourist visitor center, where we tourists can watch cartoons of the history of the Buddha and us silly Americans go buy our Starbucks. Yes sadly, there is a STARBUCKS on top of the mountain in the Big Buddha tourist center. Ugh to Starbucks, you corporate giant.
One last highlight to our trip…our three day excursion to Macau to watch the F3 Grand Prix. This was probably the driving factor for our trip to Hong Kong around this time of year. The F3 race is held every year around this time, and my parents were able to score AWESOME tickets for first row on the Lisboa Stand, just outside the Wynn hotel and casino. You will not believe what Macau looks like nowadays. Its almost exactly like Vegas but almost a bit crazier on the gambling. Macau is just a short 45 minute ferry ride from Hong Kong, with ferries leaving every few minutes.
I hope that you have enjoyed reading and seeing photos of my awesome trip to Hong Kong. Have I convinced you to go there yourselves? It really was a fun trip and now I have a lot of terrific memories through photos and video. My next project is creating my photo albums off Kodak and then posting my Japan trip here for readers.
Send me any messages with questions, or if you need explanation on the foods!
Puppies and Worms 