Woke up this morning to a beautiful skyline view of Hong Kong mainland. We are staying on Hong Kong Island. Before I came here, I had no sense of either or that there are many islands off the coast of Hong Kong mainland. But I’m learning a lot about this country on this trip. That is one of the best parts about traveling. Learning about new cultures and feeling so curious about how they live.
When I woke up, I went up to the breakfast on the 40th floor, and found a great place to look at the view and blog. The breakfast level itself with teaming with so many people, it didn’t at all seem relaxing to me, so I went up the stairs to a more private area and it was perfect and peaceful and it was nice to have some stillness to blog and reflect before we met up with our friends for the day.
Shelly and Amy Temple flew in the night before and we figured they may need more rest this morning so we got a little bit of a late morning start, which was totally fine with us. After the 7:30am starts of the Israel trip, we were happy for more restful mornings and days up to this point.
Amy and I were excited to see some sights in Hong Kong. We left the hotel in our first Hong Kong Taxi a little after 11am headed towards our meet-up spot in ‘Times Square.’ Hong Kong is like England and Indonesia where they drive on the other side of the road. So happy to be in the back of a cab and not having to drive myself around. The little red cabs are all very clean and it is an ‘offense’ to not have your seatbelt on. He pulled up to Times Square and we popped out. We had no idea if this was Times Square but just assumed, as it seemed like the end of our ride. There were all kinds of Mickey Mouse statues in the square, we walked around a little bit and then saw them in a distance. They looked cute in two little dresses and sandles and how fun to meet up with other friends so far away from home.
Amy Temple had lived here for 2 years with her husband and daughter and left about 2 years ago. She was going to be our guide the next several days. What a relief to have someone ask us what we want to see and set up the itineraries for each day. She knows how to get around easily on the public transportation system that includes mini-buses, big double-decker buses, trolley cars, underground trains, ferries and all kinds of boats. You buy what they call an “Octapus Card” and load it with money and it gets you on and off any transit without having to deal with cash and change. It is very convenient. You can also use the card to pay at many stores in town.
The big convenience store in Hong Kong is 7-11. You can do many transactions there, buy stamps, fill up your Octapus Card, etc. You see them on every corner. It is much like how you see Tobacconist shops in Italy everywhere. It is so weird to see so many 7-11’s everywhere. It feels out of place.
Our first stop was going to be to what they call the Southside in Repulse Bay. This was the area of town that Amy T lived, so she was quite familiar with the highlights. We took a mini-bus #40 about halfway there. These mini-buses are fascinating. They seat only about 19 passengers and no standing. Shelly was quickly reminded by an older woman across the aisle from her to not drink the water bottle she was holding and to fasten her seatbelt. Shelly says she is a magnet for extra instruction anywhere she travels. People feel compelled to tell her what she can and can’t do. Taking a queue from what Shelly was being told, I quickly buckled my seatbelt.
Our first stop was for coffee. We sat in a coffee shop in a really pretty shopping area and chatted. We heard the horrors of their story flying over the day before. Bottom line, don’t fly Delta unless you want to get bumped from the premium economy seat you paid for because they changed the plane they were flying over and had less premium economy seats. They also split them up and put one of them way in the back of the plane of a middle seat. Fortunately, they were able to find seats together, but this made for a stressful start to the trip. Oh, and also, Delta also didn’t order their gluten-free meal, but recommended they could have all of the ice-cream and gluten free crackers available on board for the 11 hour flight that was stopping in Japan. Huh? Yah, don’t fly Delta. They said, eventually this story will maybe be funny, but not quite yet. They were troopers were being so cheery already on this morning.
We then walked down to Repulse Bay, which is a hot spot for Chinese tourists. There were tour buses everywhere and it was teaming with Chinese tourists. We were hungry after walking around Repulse Bay for a while so I found a restaurant called, Limewood. It looked like it had good options, nice ambiance, and it had great reviews. While the food was indeed good, it took over an hour for Amy’s ‘long line fish’ to arrive. And that was only after we complained. They kept saying it takes 20 minutes, we said…um, it’s been an hour. I asked to speak to a manager and she told me, it takes 20 minutes, but realized it has been a long wait so she said she would take something off of our bill for our long wait. In the end, she took an $8 appetizer off of the bill. Huh? We actually knew what went wrong, a couple that was sat a least a half hour after us, was brought the exact same fish Amy had ordered around the time they were bringing the rest of OUR food. They had put her fish at the wrong table and didn’t realize their mistake. That couple was even LONG GONE by the time Amy’s fish finally came. To them, them must have walked out of there thinking, WOW, awesome service – food arrives 5 minutes after we order. To us, well, there is a 1-star Trip Advisor review coming their way soon!
After lunch, we. boarded a double decker bus and sat up on top in the very front. That was quite a wild ride as many branches would hit the front window on the side Amy B was on and would startle all of us. They had a severed Typhoon here a few weeks ago, so there are a lot of broken trees in the area that haven’t been cleaned up yet.
Once we arrived, we walked around the Stanley Plaza area for a while. Really nice shops and food markets that we browsed through. It also had what is called the Stanley Market – a quick trip through what is essentially a flea market for tourists. As flea markets go, it was pretty fancy. But, as with all flea markets, I’m never drawn to buy a thing.
After we were done, we took another double-decker bus back to Arberdeen Harbour. It was fun to see so many different style boats floating past us from so many different periods of time. One little boat caught my attention, he was trying to talk to me as he wanted to take the four of us on a Harbour Tour. In the end, we decided to take his tour.
He was so cute and did a great job, he had a special seat and a microphone and he ‘narrated’ the whole ride around the Harbour. It was a crack up because we couldn’t really understand him, but he was so sincere you just looked at him and nodded your head every once in a while so he felt like you were tracking with his tour.
He really didn’t need to say a thing, it was so beautiful at dusk to boat up and own the Harbour looking at all types of boats. The lights on the skyline were spectacular and the weather was perfect. He even took us up close to the famous floating restaurant. Now THAT is a gaudy spectacle to be seen!
After the tour we were hungry, it was getting quite late around 7:30pm, so we did a quick dinner at a great burger place Amy Temple knew about. I decided to have another beer. I tried their local IPA. I loved it, what has gotten into me? While we were eating dinner, Amy Temple asked if we wanted foot massages tonight, she knew a good place. So we all said, ‘Yes, please’ to that and she booked us 8:30pm appointments and asked for a private room. Wow. Okay.
Once we got to the foot massage place, they gave Amy and I shorts to change into (as we both were wearing jeans). Then they sat us in this dark room with 6 recliners – 3 on each wall facing each other. We had picked a 50 minute foot massage. They also had a 75 minute option. But neither Amy nor I could imagine we could sit still for a 75 minute foot massage, and I actually don’t have much foot to massage. So the 4 of us sat in the private room with each of us having an attendant to massage our feet for 50 minutes. They started with putting your feet in warm water, I think that alone (after we walked around all day) would have been worth the money. Only a loud belch from one of the attendants pierced the silence. We all looked at each other as if to say with our eyes, did that just happen? We looked over to Amy T and she nodded, yes. She explained later, in this culture it is considered unhealthy to keep any gas inside out of either end. So we were lucky it was only a belch. Regardless, we loved the foot massages. It’s not expensive at all to do this and it is a ‘thing’ to do in Hong Kong, there are foot massage places everywhere.
We pretty much all almost fell asleep, it was blissful. They end the night with a 5 minute neck and shoulder massage. How could you say no to wanting this every night? We all agreed we would be back. After massages it was almost 10pm, so we all headed back to our hotel ready to crash for the night. Amy T had a full day planned for us on Tuesday!