around the world one continent at a time: Hong Kong

Hello All,

WOW. Hong Kong is amazing! Words can't describe how cool it is, it's like nothing i've ever seen before. Skyscrapers as far as the eye can see, and down by the harbor seeing them lit up at night is truly something everyone should see. It's cool how Hong Kong is setup, all the Skyscraper pictures you see of Hong Kong are of Hong Kong island, just across the harbor is Kowloon Island (where we're staying) and were most of the people live. All the business is done on Hong Kong island and although there are residential areas, it'll cost you upwards of $2,000 us for a studio!!

IFC 2 building. second biggest in Hong Kong

Bubble tea!!!

Well, we got into Hong Kong at 10:35 thursday night and by the time we got through with getting our bags, customs, and immigration it was around 11:40 before we got the MTR (metro) into Hong Kong island which made it kind of scary because it's about a 25 minute ride into Hong Kong station, and from there we had to transfer to a different line to get to where our hotel was, but the MTR stops running at midnight. It forced us to have to pay for a taxi, which wasn't horrible at all actually. We made it to our Hostel at around 12:30, left our bags and went for a stroll down nathan road. You would think that it being midnight everyone would be at home sleeping, not in Hong Kong. It was like we were out at mid day, people everywhere, shops and food joints still open. We ended up heading back to the hostel around 2:30am and crashing as well as to rest for the next day.

So it's our first full day and we woke up, got ready and headed out for the day. We walked down nathan road to the harbor, it was quite the walk and took about an hour or so to get down to the harbor. We were supposed to meet up with my friend who studied at BSU but now lived in Hong Kong, Terry Mak for those of you who know him from the car scene, but he ended up getting stuck in a meeting and didn't catch up with him until later. We walked up and down the harbor and took our pictures until i was finally able to get ahold of Terry. Once we got ahold of him we planned to meet up on Hong Kong island, it was great seeing him again after about 5-7 years or so since he had left Boise. He showed us around Hong Kong island and took us to Lan Kwai Fong which is a road lined with pubs and bars and of course where I'd spend my nights in Hong Kong!!! After we got done hanging out with Terry we went back to the Kowloon side and had planned on hanging around until 8pm, it was about 5:30pm, to watch the light show that the city does, which i've heard is way cool, but the weather got bad and we decided to leave it for another night. So what we did is went back to the hostel and took a nap, we ended up waking up at 11pm and decided to get ready to go out, ended up getting to Lan Wai Fon around midnight and it was insane. The street was full of people as they were getting drinks inside the pub then heading out to the street, we ended up getting a beer and it was $55 hong kong dollars which was ridiculous! I then got the bright idea to hit up club 7 (7-11) for some cheep drinks. So what we did is we'd go down the street to club 7 and we'd get two beers at a time then head back up the street to the pubs and hung out and it was anywhere from 30-40 hong kong dollars depending on the beer you got, victory!! It was pretty intense as drunk people were everywhere, we even saw a fight break out and this drunk guy knocked out a girl and then proceeded to get his ass beat by two brothas!! So after a long and drunken night out we had to figure out how to get across the harbor and back to our hotel, the taxi would have ran us about 80-90 hong kong dollars or we could wait for either the MTR or the ferry to open, so of course we decided to wait so we set off and walked around and eventually found a McDonalds and got some late night grub and in the process i tried to jump a fence and ate shit...hard, then went off to the ferry terminal to wait for it to open. It was about 5:30 and it opened at 7am, I remember sitting down at a table but don't remember passing out ha, my friends, being the good friends that they are, started finding shit and eventually had me fenced in, saw the pics, until they eventually decided to wake me up, at that point i was like fuck it, lets take a taxi so we cabbed it back as i was getting tired and didn't want to wait for the ferry any longer…hangs head in shame.

Passed the fuck out

Hooligans up to no good!


ugh wtf is this sign doing here

Lan Kwai Fong

in front of Club 7. don't mind the other sign

After our drunken good times the first night, we decided to do something a little more productive today. We woke up and decided to head up to the Tian Tan Buddha and go for a ride on the cable cars, we get ready and head out at around 11:30am. It was raining so we figured it would be a good day to go see as their can be up to a 4 hour wait to go up the cable cars. We get out there and were hungry, there just so happened to be a mall and we headed for the food court which was waaaay good, they had different foods from different countries, i decided on the vietnamese cuisine and it was delicious. We get done eating and head up to the cable car terminal, get our tickets sorted and hop on for the ride, it was foggy and overcast, but on a clear day i hear you can see Hong Kong island on the way up, which would have been amazing. We get up to the little village and walked around eventually making it to the Buddha, which happened to be about 8 flights of stairs up, and started the trek up. Got up to the top and go to see the Buddha up close, it's way cool and is the biggest Buddha statue in the world. After spending most of the day up there we headed back into town and are now just relaxing before another fun night out. Will post more from the night out and possibly Bangkok here soon, so until then. Enjoy!!