Hong Kong I: Arrival
We arrived at our hostel late Friday night (the picture above is from Saturday morning) and were up bright and early the next day. The hostel was quite nice, as well as quite cheap, and it was really cool to experience the "international youth hostel" vibe that I heard and read so much about first-hand while working as a map editor for Let's Go. The hostel was filled with people from all over the world, and while I'm glad I don't have to live in those kinds of accommodations all the time, it was neat to get a taste of that lifestyle.
Location-wise, it would have been hard to do much better than we did in our hostel -- we were less than one block away from the waterfront, in the Causeway Bay area of Hong Kong. Causeway Bay, in addition to overlooking Victoria Harbour, is one of the ritziest shopping districts in the whole city. Of course, none of the students we were traveling with would ever dream of buying stuff there, but it made for a quite safe neighborhood (I made sure of that before we went), which is not always easy to find when you're searching for budget youth hostels.
We took the metro (Hong Kong has, by the way, one of the most incredibly useful urban transporation networks I have ever seen) to Kowloon, where we were meeting with a few other students, and experienced first-hand the wonders of cell-phone-less coordination in a city where only one person speaks the language.
Once the logistics were out of the way, however, everything was smooth sailing. We collected everybody and set out to find a cheap breakfast/lunch in central Hong Kong.
After lunching in a cute diner (on the biggest bowl of fried rice I have ever seen, I might mention), the group split upt to go our different ways: Eric and Matt to go to Macau, a neighboring Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic, and Kevin, Chris, Manuel, Sheila, and I to go to Ocean Park, Hong Kong's most famous theme park.
Hailing the double-decker bus to Ocean Park also proved complicated, but once we were aboard, things were smooth again. We drank in the views from every angle from the top of the bus, becoming more and more excited as the buildings thinned out and expansive views of the waterfront began to appear.
Almost there...!
posted by Kelly @ 12:46 PM
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