Hong Kong

Hong Kong at a glance:

- National Pastime: shopping

- Selfies: constant

- Sidewalks: impassable

- Tea: high

- Overall impression: great

Visit 1: October

Approaching the Buddha from the trail on Lantau

Lantau island

I visited Hong Kong several times this this Fall/Winter.  My first trip was only 3 days, but I soon came back for about 2 weeks.  My colleague and friend Jason was there with me, and we decided to explore the city a bit.

We were working for a client based in Kowloon, near the Star Ferry.  The office is located in Harbour City shopping center, which is probably the most luxurious and insane shopping mall I’ve ever seen.  It’s full of impossibly priced luxury stores, and even has a kids couture wing (Fendi Kids, Armani Kids, etc.).  WTF.  A common sight is a person dragging 2 massive suitcases through the mall – apparently mainlanders flock to Harbour City to stock up on luxury clothing they can’t get in China, and pack it all into huge suitcases to take back.

Over the weekend, I spent a day walking around Kowloon, stopping in at Yau Ma Tei temple and Mon Kok, which is a bustling area that apparently had some Occupy action going on at one point.  Jason and I also took the train to Lantau Island (where the airport is located), and did a ~2 hour hike up to a giant buddha statue located in a touristy village area.  The hike was gorgeous and a fun time – basically stairs the whole way up, following the track of a gondola (which we took back down).

I also got to visit mainland China for the first time for work, traveling to Shenzen (which is just across the border) for meetings, and visiting a factory in Zuhai.

It’s interesting – the sky could be blue in Hong Kong, and as soon as you approach the China border, the sky turns grey with pollution.  Apparently the situation is improving, but from what I saw, it’s still pretty bad.

Visit 2: November

The city of Hong Kong

Kristen at the top of Victoria Peak

During my second visit to Hong Kong (this time for 3 weeks), I got extremely lucky.  Kristen got staffed on a project for the same client, and ended up spending 2 weeks in Hong Kong with me!  It’s probably the first time in history that traveling to Asia for 3 weeks could be described as “convenient”.

For work, I got to attend several meetings at factories in mainland China, near Guangzhou.  For some reason, they always seem to serve Pizza Hut when the white people come to town.  Seriously, I was probably in mainland attending meetings for a total of 8 days, and I was served Pizza Hut for lunch probably 6 times.

But outside of my trips to the mainland, I had some really spectacular food in Hong Kong (and in Guangzhou for that matter).  We tried to get as much local flavor as possible while we were in town – we hit Cantonese joints on side roads, got Peking Duck at Spring Deer several times, and tried out various dim sum places.

The most memorable dim sum experience came the weekend when Kristen arrived.  We wanted to do as much Hong Kong-centric stuff as possible, so we’d gone to high tea at the Intercontinental the night before, and spend the next day walking through the Central district.  We were joined by our friend and colleague Vikas.  We went to a very famous dim sum restaurant for lunch on Sunday – it’s reputation was “hot, crowded, and local.”  It was a zoo.  Nobody spoke english, and it was not clear to us how the system worked.  A cart would come out of the kitchen, it would get mobbed by people before it could make the rounds, and would go straight back to the kitchen, empty.  Since we don’t speak Cantonese, our only choice was to go up to the cart and try and just take whatever they were serving (we never had any idea what we were eating).  Though we did end up flagging a waiter down and pointing to some tea duck soup a guy near us was eating.

The following weekend, our group walked up to the top of Victoria Peak for some great scenery, and then found a much better (and cleaner, and friendlier) dim sum place for lunch in a train station in Central.  It was probably the best dim sum I’ve ever had (finally!).  We spent the rest of the day walking around central and Kowloon.

Finally, after another week of traveling back and forth to mainland, Kristen left for Malaysia and Indonesia to visit more factories, and my time in Hong Kong was done.