Hong Kong Part One

The beginning of October is a wonderful time of the year in China. The Chinese celebrate their Autumn Festival and also their National day, which is celebrated for a whole week! The students went home for the whole week, so we didn’t have classes to teach. Since we had to renew our visas at some point in our China adventure, we took the opportunity to have a week long holiday and visited some other parts of Asia, namely Hong Kong and the Philippines.
 

Our planning was intricate, kind of. We figured out beforehand what we could do to make the most out of our trip and stretch our money the furthest, which of course required sacrifices, the first of which concerned our sleeping arrangements for the first two nights! Since we arrived in Shenzhen at 1am, we decided to just stay in the airport before leaving for Hong Kong the next morning, and so we took a little catnap on the benches of the Shenzhen airport. Not the comfiest, but pennies were saved! Five and a half hours later, we were on the Subway, headed to the Hong Kong border.

 

We had heard stories of how difficult it could be to get across the border, since we do not speak Chinese and had never been to Shenzhen before. We found everything really easy, and within a couple of hours, we were standing on the Avenue of the Stars around Victoria Harbour, passports stamped, and ready to go.
 

Our first stop was at the Hong Kong Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. What a wonderful place to be. It was so nice to see an LDS temple in this part of the world.
 

Luckily, it was Wednesday, and admission to the Hong Kong Museum was free, so we went in. It was quite interesting, learning a bit more about ancient China, and then learning more about Hong Kong and the recent governmental changes that have happened there. I have to say though, the coolest part of the whole museum was a huge piece of artwork on the floor on the way out. We felt cool that we had already seen the real Terracotta Warriors, and took a picture with them.
 

Next up was the world famous Harbour. The sun was out, the water looked inviting, and the multitude of skyscrapers really was something! We really were amazed at just how many buildings were there.
 

We walked down Avenue of the Stars, which was basically just a not-so-cool Hollywood Boulevard filled with Asian actors that we did not recognize, apart from Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee. However, the Avenue was situated in the perfect place to see the Harbour in all its grandeur, and so it was definitely worthwhile to go.
 

Next we took a trip to Victoria’s Peak, which overlooks the City. We took the famous Peak Tram to get to the top, which was incredibly steep, but gave us incredible views of the city all the way to the top. Anyone who goes to Hong Kong has to visit the peak. It puts it all into perspective, just how big the concrete jungle of Hong Kong is. We then went back down to sea-level and watched the Light Show from a little bridge over a busy road.

Since we were going to fly the very next morning, we decided to get to the airport that night and rough it again. That was one of our yearly goals after all. We arrived at the Hong Kong airport at around midnight and were lucky enough to find decent chairs, from which we fashioned what we call Pods – small Star Wars inspired beds that would protect our stuff and maybe let us sleep a bit. They worked like a charm, waking us up every hour or so just so that we could make sure that our bags were still between our legs. A small price to pay for the Philippine adventure that awaited us!