Oh hey friends!
You probably all think I have fallen off the face of the planet! Worry not. I am still alive. Just extraordinarily busy. But it’s time for another post. I’m super behind so I thought I would tell you a bit more about my trip to Hong Kong. This time maybe just a little more seriously than before.
I will begin by saying, however, that I got REALLY sick right after this trip. The whole trip is a bit of tired, pre-dead in bed sick so some spots are a bit fuzzy.
Also, you should know that we literally had almost no plan going into this. My last HK post was a bit silly but honestly the only the we knew we REALLY needed to do in HK was eat everything we could possibly find. And I think it’s safe to say that we did that. We basically just wandered around a lot and ate. It was great! And we found a lot of cool stuff along the way. Now here’s a ton of photos! (Check my Facebook if you want more. We really did take like 7 billion…)
Pre-departure! I’ll be the selfie stick, you be the remote! (Marshal forgot a piece of his selfie stick. We were so excited to be stereotypical Asian tourists we just decided to make it work with what we had)
Then, we have a nice picture of Marshal on a really sweet bridge. It was round. And cool. And look! It’s Hong Kong!
And then Marshal in front of this restaurant that was open late near our hostel. We went there at least 2 nights around midnight-ish or later. It was pretty tasty although possible prostitutes were standing about…
This is Marshal in his natural state, taking photos of our food. You can thank him for my first HK post.
This was a place that was active and full of people selling all sorts of clothes and things during the day. At night it looks super sketchy though. There were places like this all over.
Super hero McDonald’s!
Penguin Marshal!
We were in HK while student protests were happening. As far as I understand, China was/is trying to keep control of HK and keep it from becoming properly democratic and many (but not all) of the people of HK do not like that. We were a little worried that we were very close to them but we never saw anything violent or really even… happening at all. Although it was raining most of the time which I guess might put a damper on a good protest. Really it just seemed like the government was blocking off streets to keep people from being injured since they were occupying major intersections. The protesters did stay in the streets through the bad weather though and we ran across several different areas where major roads were blocked by protesters.
There were signs hanging up all over the area surrounding the protesters. This one stuck with me. (If you can’t read it from the photo, the pink writing crosses out “Proud of” and replaces it with “Shame”)
I liked this overgrown scooter on the side of the road near the beach. Just looked cool.
This is realistically the reason we ended up in HK instead of Krabi or something. My water polo team sent a team to represent the club at an ocean 3v3 water polo tournament. By the time I arrived in Singapore it was too late for me to join officially but I just wanted to go see it! And HK didn’t seem like a bad place to visit either. When I got there, however, all of my teammates looked at me and said “Why aren’t you playing??” and promptly got me on a team and found someone for me to borrow a suit from (thank you very nice German family). The team I played one game for was all random teenagers and they were terrible so the game was really short but I still had a great time and can say I played ocean water polo in HK and that’s pretty freaking awesome if you ask me!
It was not warm on this beach. Also this tree really gives Marshal an awesome hair do.
We found this abandoned school right near the beach. It was super awesome and a bit creepy.
We couldn’t find Din Tai Fung (cheapeast 3 Michelin star restaurant in the world)! It had moved from where we thought it was so we found another random dumpling place. We were starving. It did not disappoint.
Streets were so nuts and covered in signs and bamboo scaffolding. It was just like the movies.
Steamed milk. Looks funny. Was amazing.
More protests.
The famous HK skyline. Funny story about this. The skyline lights up and dances to music at a certain time of night. We were like cool! Let’s time it so we are on a ferry and get to watch from the water! Great idea! Except we totally got the timing wrong. We were already on the other side of the river when it started! So we found a place to watch from way too close and we couldn’t hear the music. So we put on random music. And found that it worked really well. I think we started by singing the Star Wars Theme and then we put my phone on shuffle with Chandelier followed by The Ballad of Mr Steak. It worked shockingly well with the lights on the buildings. We were dying giggling. We may not have had the “correct” experience, but we definitely had a unique and hilarious one.
Background: We saw this lady in full PHOTO STANCE at the airport in Singapore before we left. We thought it was hilarious. And it became a thing.
Marshal’s interpretation of photo stance. Gotta have a serious stance for a serious picture. This is how the pros do it.
We took a tram up to The Peak. It was fancy! You could see everything from above. It was pretty neat!
There were also a bunch of photos of Jackie Chan. I may have gotten excited and taken a picture with each of them… Okay, some I took multiple pictures with.
There was a Bubba Gump’s so I took Marshal for a cookie sundae which is like the best thing ever. Except it was tiny compared to what you get in the US and the cookie wasn’t even warm!!! *cries into whipped cream*
Satay anyone? We tried to go to a night market everyone said was great but it was totally dead when we showed up. So we ate more food.
Marshal defying authority.
There was a set of like 30 escalators. So many escalators. I can’t even remember what it was called or why they are there. But you can ride them up a very large hill.
But it turns out there’s nothing at the top?? Except Marshal and I doing silly poses. I guess it is all about the journey…
It is also all about silly faces with knitted creatures attached to handrails.
Photo in the MTR station. We went through Central station a lot. Pro tip: the tourist travel pass is a rip off. Just get the Octopus pass and load on however much money you need. It’s cheaper.
Heading to the Big Buddha by sky tram!
Random cows with Big Buddha.
Doge! Much doge. Such fluff. wow.
This was all before we realized we were late for our flight. And then we got to the airport and realized, no. We were really late for our flight. Like 12 hours late for our flight. Oops. Oh well. We did make it back in time for work on Monday although it was a bit expensive. Although we didn’t get to actually go to Disneyland, I did get to take this picture in a Disney store in the airport. Pretty much the same thing right??
