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This past weekend we made our first trip to Hong Kong. As I mentioned in earlier posts, we have to go into Hong Kong once every 30 days to "renew" our visas. We were prodding Mike to make the trip with us, since he is much more familiar with the city than us. He finally, caved and said he would bring Xiao Li along with him. We started our trip with breakfast at the Time Coffee restaurant for breakfast at 9 AM.
From there we drove to Shenzhen in Mikes car. There was quite a bit of rain, but when we arrived in Hong Kong we found out that we missed the largest portion of the storm. The papers said that Hong Kong received 17 inches of rain in just under 10 hours. There was video of cars up to their hoods in water. The only signs of this flooding when we arrived were shops that had all their carpet ripped out and on the sidewalk.
Navigating into the train station in Shenzhen is always a chore and if it wasn't for Mikes exceptional chinese driving skills, we would have been there much later than we were. We finally got into the train station and had to go through the customs process. There was a small issue with Xiao Li getting through customs getting out of China. She had to get a hold of a travel agency that acted as her guide to get her through customs and from there on we didn't have any problems. Once through China customs, we had to go through one final customs line to get into Hong Kong. From there we bought four first class train tickets for the one hour train ride into Hong Kong. First class gets you a guaranteed seat and a much more comfortable car.
The train took us to a station right by the hotel we would be staying in. The Sheraton Hong Kong is the hotel that most of the people from Graco stay at. The place was very nice and we were able to get a harbor view room.
The room was smaller than our big place in Qing Xi, but they did a great job with making the best of the space. The bed was extremely comfortable and the shower had two shower heads that felt like they were dumping buckets of water on you.
After quickly dropping off our stuff, we got out onto the streets and starting walking around one of the main shopping areas. This area of Hong Kong has many of the high end stores like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, etc...And they also have more knock off stands/stores than you could imagine. People are constantly saying "copy watch, copy bag, tailor, CD, DVD" to you as you walk down the side walk. The shopping scene got to be a annoying rather quickly and the fact that we were hungry didn't help. We were convinced to come into this Indian/Malaysian/Thai restaurant by another guy on the sidewalk trying to drum up business. It wound up being a great meal where we had some Indian beers and some really good food. It definitely wasn't the cheapest lunch we've ever had, actually it was by far the most expensive lunch i've ever seen for 4 people.
After lunch we continued to walk around and shop.
After a stop at the hotel for a bathroom break and to drop off what Mike had purchased we walked down to "star walk" which is similar to the place back home that has all the stars and their hand prints are...neither of us can think of the name of that place right now, maybe walk of fame??...
From there we took a ferry across the harbor over the Wan Chai area. This is the area where all the flooding was, but we had no idea that it had happened until we saw some video on the TV while waiting for the boat. As I said before, there was not serious devistation and people were trying to clean up their shops. The area where we were walking about wound up being a whole bunch of home decoration and renovation stores, so there wasn't much to look at. The reason for us going over to this part of town was based on the manager at the "Spice Restaurant" that we ate lunch at. She told us there would be an American style band at this one bar in Wan Chai and it would be a good time. Well, we finally made it to that bar and it was very small and the people were pretty rude to us. The rude personalities was something that we encountered quite a bit in Hong Kong, but I guess you will have that in any big city. Once again we were getting hungry and decisions were becoming tedious, so we decided we wanted to eat dim sum for dinner but we couldn't find a place that had those little carts that they push around and you pick the dishes you want. We actually wound up in a somewhat fancy restaurant that had half way decent food.
However, our disappointment in them not having Dim Sum carts and the lack of hospitality that we are used to in Chinese restaurants gave us a negative attitude and were in and out of there before we knew it.
From there we weren't very sure on where we were going to head next. Mike wanted to get up into La Kuai Fang (an area up on a huge hill that has all kinds of nightlife and restaurants)...but we were considering sticking round Wan Chai to see how things turned out there...Liz said, "lets go to that place you want to check out Mike" and it wasn't 10 seconds until we were in a cab on our way to this bar Mike has been to that has great live music.
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