Hong Kong

Last week I returned from a 10 day trip all over southern China. I started out with a brief stay in Shanzhen en route to Hong Kong for work, followed by about six days in Xiamen and then about three days in Guilin.

The work bit was of course ridiculous, what with all the efforts on the part of my school to cut costs. Instead of taking a taxi directly to the airport in Changchun (which takes about two hours), we took a taxi to the train station in Songyuan, took a train to Changchun, walked to another train station to take another train to the airport (five hours total there), where we took a plane (which we almost missed) and naturally didn't have a direct flight to Shenzhen, and then rounded it all out with a taxi to our hotel. We crashed right away, as we got in pretty late, and then in the morning took three different taxis to three different bus stations before we found one that went to Hong Kong (don't ask me how they didn't know this ahead of time). We finally got on our bus and had to take that one to another bus, to a taxi, to another taxi to check into our hotel in Hong Kong before we could get anything done. Ridiiiiiculous.

Two of us shared this room. Thank god we're small girls!

I went to Hong Kong coming off three consecutive days of Chinese lessons, so I was completely in "attempt as much Chinese as possible" mode when we got there. It was super discouraging and confusing that nobody seemed to understand me and respond to the most basic things... until we realized that they don't speak Mandarin in Hong Kong, they speak Cantonese and English. The English influence is really apparent, not just in the language and the amount of people that speak it. They drive on the left side of the road and drivers seats are on the right side of cards, completely unlike the rest of China. They have their own money. Hong Kong's relationship to China is really interesting. It's officially part of China, but in practice, not so much. Chinese people need a visa to get in!

While we were there we didn't really have time to do much in the way of leisure activities. We were all there for only one night, the rest of my group ended up staying for two, but I had places to go and people to see! Once we finished our work business, we were able to go out that night. We had Mexican food for dinner (YAY!), went to a place called The Peak, which is basically a mountain top overlooking the city and an awesome bar area called Soho.

I'll be back in Hong Kong for work again within the next month, but the trip will be quite similar, with minimal exploration time. Once I move down south to Xiamen, I'll be significantly closer so will be able to make much better exploratory trips!