My jet lag wasn’t over yet – only five hours of sleep. Oh well, it could be worse. I was up at 3:00 a.m. though. We woke up very early, checked out quickly, and took a cab to the train station. This was the only time this trip that we were given an estimate on how much the fare would be and it was actually lower. We left so early it was strange seeing empty streets during daylight hours in Hong Kong! We took the Airport Express back to Hong Kong Airport and it couldn’t have been easier. The apartment high rise portion of the city seemed like something out of a science fiction movie.
Category: Hong Kong
Hong Kong Day Three – Anybody Hungry?
All of my pics from this day are of food.
Warning: this post might make you hungry.
My most important note of this day? “10 hours of sleep.” Boy did it feel good. Sal was totally jealous. It was about time I slept better than him, though. Sorry, Sal.
We decided to go for Dim Sum at this place I saw on a few different videos on YouTube: Social Place. They are known for their cute and tasty food. As we left the hotel and headed outside the humidity hit me hard. It was almost hard to breathe; it was just next level. Luckily we didn’t have to walk far to reach our destination because I was starting to feel iffy. Sal said we might have to rethink retiring to a country with high humidity. Hey may have a point. The good news is the restaurant was in a mall, with sweet, sweet AC. Have I mentioned the huge number of malls there ? There are malls attached to subway stations, malls attached to business offices, malls attached to residential spaces, and malls that are their own buildings. Lots and lots of malls. If you’re a certain type of shopper, Hong Kong is for you.
We got to the restaurant before it opened and perused the menu. Soon they opened and sat us. Not a ton of English spoken here, but the menus had it and that’s all that matters. This restaurant had a time limit for tables as well. We’d basically made our choices while waiting, so it wasn’t a problem.
The presentation of the food was fantastic. A few tables down from us they got the flaming pineapple with beef:
We thought we would walk off our big lunch at Kowloon Park, which was nearby. This was a bad idea because it was so freaking hot and the park was on a hill. Ah well. We walked around some, saw some birds, watched some men practicing some sort of fighting, and took some pics of interesting statues. Where are those pictures? Good question. They appear to be missing. We also noticed a couple of videos missing yesterday. I’m worried what else is missing as we get further into the trip and review the photos and videos. It’s very upsetting.
Deep breath. Deep breath. Sorry for the sidetrack. Back to the food!
After the park we decided to do a little shopping. We went to a lovely tea shop and got a gift for my friend who was watching the cats for us since she’s English and a tea addict. The women working at the shop were so friendly and helpful!
Walking back to the hotel a Hong Kong man walked by wearing a shirt that said, “Lift Heavy Shit”. Not gonna lie. I giggled wondering if he knew what it said or not. We often see people wearing shirts with English words, and a lot of times the English isn’t correct…which makes us think they don’t really know what they are wearing sometimes. Well, I thought it was funny. Probably had to be there.
We got back to the hotel and cool, cool air conditioning. We showered and changed for our fancy dinner at Man Wah Restaurant in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. We chose this place because of the awesome views, great food reviews, and the fact that we could get 1/2 a Peking Duck (most places you have to get the whole duck and that is way too much duck for two people).
And that’s how we ended our time in Hong Kong. No egg waffle – way too stuffed – but what a fantastic meal!
Hong Kong Day Two
I repeated my 5 hours of sleep routine and was up at 3 again. Good grief. I was envious of Sal sleeping away. I just couldn’t fall back asleep, so I read while he snored contently.
Once again we had a cheap 7-11 breakfast. We also added money to our travel card. The woman at 7-11 didn’t speak English, really, but we learned pretty quickly that most people understand charades/pantomime. We had decided that we would go see the Big Buddha on Lantau Island that day, which meant an early start and a lot of travel to get there/back. We had a full day in store. We got to the Subway and I went through without issue, but Sal had a problem with his travel card and had to find someone and do the charade thing again. I waited for him on the other side of the turnstile since I had already paid. I had a pretty big epiphany while I waited, and that was that I would never want to go to a new-to-me large city (in a foreign country) by myself. I found it really intimidating and stressful. I was slightly worried Sal wouldn’t find me because of the crowds, but of course he did. I have new respect for the solo travelers beyond just having to deal with the loneliness that must be a part of that sort of travel. Thank goodness for Sal.
Hong Kong Day One
I had been up about 30+ hours straight with no sleep. You would have thought I would have slept like a log when we finally went to bed. You would have been wrong. I slept for 5 hours, and that wasn’t even straight. Oh jet lag. You’re cruel.
Something that I forgot to mention about the first night is when we went to get the egg waffles we got lost in the mall and couldn’t figure out how to exit and get outside. It will surprise absolutely nobody that knows me that I got lost, but hey Sal did, too! It was a comedy of errors. It should have been obvious. We followed exit signs, but they didn’t look like ‘real’ exits, but more like emergency exits and we were afraid of setting off some kind of alarm. We even asked a nice lady who was cleaning the floors, but she didn’t speak English. She pointed to one of the fake looking exit signs, so who knows? We eventually figured it out, but let’s just say it was a humbling experience because we got lost a few times in that mall.
A Very Long Day
The Back Story…
The plan in 2018 was to visit Japan for a couple reasons:
- Everyone we knew who had ever been there had only great things to say about it.
- We already had the Japanese encephalitis shot, so why not go before we had to get it again? Especially since I got sick from it the last time.
- We love sushi.
- We love temples.
Then Sal found out about a conference he could speak at in Sydney, and he had a work meeting a few weeks later also in Sydney, so we switched our plans and went to Australia instead because:
- Work would pay for the Sydney portion and Sal’s flight.
- See #1. That was the only reason. It’s really expensive flying Business Class that far and there was no way I was going in Coach!
That took care of the big trip of 2018, but since Japan was still #1 on our list of places we wanted to go we made it top priority for 2019. Someone suggested combining Hong Kong with Japan, so that’s what we did because we could get a direct flight there, too, and we’d arrive at night, which is better than having to stay awake all day.
Neeners Travels 