Hong Kong

Saturday the 21st (China time)

We arrived in Hong Kong safe and sound! The last flight was good, but we were both ready to be off the plane! We got our luggage quickly and made it through customs with no problems. Ralph met us at the airport right away and we took a tram into Hong Kong.

The British influence can be felt all over Hong Kong. The money, although not pounds, is designed very much like pounds! Signage around town really shows the English influence too! The area around our hotel was pretty touristy, but our hotel was really nice!
This is the our room - small but very nice! This is the only soft bed we will sleep on our entire trip!
This is our room from the other direction

This is the view looking out our window - wow- what a difference! Very humbling


There was really a mint left on our pillow when we came back from dinner!


Every street corner has 3 or 4 men who approach and follow you asking you to come up to their shop to look at copy watches, handbags, and tailored suits. It became almost comical because they approach you one after the other. Hong Kong is very modern, and stores carry many items like you would find in mall stores. There are some touristy shops with "traditional" type trinkets, but most of the stores were very modern. The prices were comparable to US city prices, no big bargains on electronics (unless you look at buying them from the copy watch people, but then I fear what that might mean!)

We took a ferry across to the other side of the island, and it was beautiful at night, the lights from the city was amazing.
One view of the skyline from the boat.

On the other side of the dock there were some men fishing, we were all laughing about it because the water there is so polluted, we were wondering if the fishing was a decoy for something else (like selling drugs).

We slept really well and got up to eat at the YMCA - which is a really nice hotel here!! The breakfast was an international breakfast, with scrambled eggs, right next to fish, rice, porridge and broccoli! It was a really good breakfast though and we all ate more than we should have! It was also cool to watch out the window and see as Hong Kong "woke up" and more people were on the street.

We then went to an international church service which was really nice. The message was really good :) Hong Kong is very open, as open as the States. We then took a trolley ride to see the city, it was really neat!

We did buy a few souvenirs, but I wanted to wait until we got to mainland to get most things. It was pretty cool to watch Ralph barter in Chinese :) Hong Kong was an amazing place, very diverse, we didn't even stick out there. It has just about everything you would expect from a big city!