Today we got off to kind of a late start, and I was finally able to sleep in past 630am (when the sun comes up) due to the fact that the room that we were in last night was a freaking cave. Really, a cave. No windows. 8' x 6'. But, a good night of sleep, so no complaints there. Tonight we moved to a new room with a PRIVATE bathroom, a door on the shower, and I get to sleep in a full-size bed = luxury. Anyways, about the day. It started with a trip to asian fast food which turned into a trip to burger king. At the first place, I can't recall the name, I ordered an American Sausage Breakfast. Sounds decent right? A piece of sausage, some eggs, and some toast, and I can say I tried to eat at an Asian place. WRONG. An American Sausage Breakfast consists of freaking two hot dogs, a paper thin piece of beef, and a huge piece of white toast. You had to be there to believe it; clearly their menu maker has never been to america. I'll post a picture at the end. So, burger king it was, and a sausage crossanwich really hit the spot.
From there we were off to the Big Buddah statue (a big tourist attraction aroud here), which is in tung chung (spelling?) way up in the hills near a monestary and a fishing village. We waited in line for a bit to board the gondola/cable car/disneyland ride/whatever you call it that took us over a bay and up a huge mountain. It was about a 30minute ride and the scenery was incredible. Definitely didn't feel like we were in the most vertical city in the world anymore...there were a few skyscrapers, but mainly just green, lush mountains and sparkling blue ocean. On the ride up we met a guy from Dublin name Andy...sidenote, the name Andy is apparently a very common theme in this trip--one of the main people emily got info from for the trip is named Andy, the German guy that we roomed with two nights ago was Andy, and this guy was Andy. And, there has really only been one other guy we talked to on this trip (the guy from texas i mentioned in the last post), and although i missed his name, he was wearing the same shoes as me and had the same camera...pretty weird coincidences. Anyway, Andy from Dublin--super cool dude, worked as a lawyer in a big bank there...got to talk a little about the financial crisis in Ireland, which is even messier than ours if that's even possible, but he felt like things were looking up. Hmm the way AIB and IRE have been trading suggest otherwise, but gotta love the optimism. Anyways, he stuck with us for the afternoon and it was cool to have him along. The Big Buddah--wow, big buddah is the understatement of the century. It's like 400feet tall, maybe taller. HUGE. I couldn't believe it...you can see it for miles as long as youre at a high enough elevation that the moutains don't block your view. You have to climb about 25 flights of stairs to get up to it, but the views of the surrouding mountains are pretty breathtaking once youre up there. We got some cool photos, checked out the monestary, and that's really all there was to do up there. But getting to see the Buddah was completely worth it. We also saw a few monks, and I was able to snap a quick photo of Emily standing in front of one. Super cool pic, and yes I will be photoshopping myself into that one.
After this, we hopped on the metro and made our way back to our side of kowloon. With laundry and some other things to be done before leaving for Thailand tomorrow, that was pretty much it for today....or that's what I thought. Turns out, I didn't bring any laundry detergent. And so my first struggle of this trip began. I set out in this insanely crowded city to find the nearest drug store to buy some laundry soap. Simple, right? dead wrong. I literally went to 7 different drug stores, and not a single one sold laundry soap AND not a single employee in any of them spoke english to direct me where to go. I wondered for about 2hours trying to find soap, and damnit I was so frustrated...you know how i get. FINALLY, I foud a hole in the wall pharmacy where one dude spoke a tiny bit of english. Enough to tell me to go into the GIANT mall on argyle street and go to the supermarket. Once I found the mall, I had a new problem. The directory was in cantanese, the mall was 4stories high, and again, no one spoke english. Wondered around for 30more minutes, and finally found an info desk where a nice lady spoke english and pointed me in the right direction. Found the supermarket, which carried no small containers of laundry soap, so i bought a freaking bar of laundry soap (could have just bought a damn bar of soap at the drug store), some ziplock bags, some granola bars, and was finally done with this journey. I found my way back towards our hostel, defintely absolutely for sure stopped at circle K (Yes they have those here) for two tall cans of beer which i felt i had earned, and went back to the Ah-Shan. I guess I was sort of proud of myself for staying relatively calm..I'll take the small victory.
Random thoughts and observations of today and the last few days an hong kong:
-busses and cars here drive insane and insanely close together, and do not stop for pedestrians. NYC on steroids in that respect
-fast food places here, like mcdonals, pizza hut, kfc, burger king, are all incredibly nice and well decorated. they would be the equivalent of a NICE place to eat in the U.S.....pretty weird
-HongKong-ians (I don't actually know what they call themselves), are just like any other race or nationality. Some are nice, mean, happy, sad, tall (ok, maybe not that), short, fat, skinny, ugly, beautiful, etc. I guess this should've been obvious, but it's easy to generalize what an entire race is like when you haven't really been exposed to the culture first-hand. Kind of a cool experience so far in that regard
-Emily likes to sleep alot, I like to sleep a little. We'll see how that ends up
-I'm really glad I brought a silk sack--like a sleeping bag, but just thin silk--to sleep in. Definitely gives me some peace of mind when sleeping in a random hostel bed on the 14th floor of a rundown hong kong building
-glad that i got to hang out with emily's family...it was super cool to get a local experience. hopefully i can get meet up with kstew in bangkok and get the same thing there
-it's really hard to find anything but a really light beer here. all of the asian beers taste like keystone, and all of the american/european beers they sell are light. what i would do for a fat tire, or a 1554, or a new castle, ...etc
Ok, I could list random thoughts for hours, thats enough. Hong Kong, it's been real. Bangkok, see you soon. Here are some pictures:
light asian beer
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