February 1, 2009: Hong Kong, China

Hong Kong! It’s quite a pretty thing to look at, though I’m not entirely sure about just walking around it. It’s kind of a big city and when I say kind of, I mean extremely. They’ve packed all these people and buildings on this tiny amount of space and NONE of it is flat. I didn’t know that Hong Kong is actually a series of variously sized islands and only one of them is actually named Hong Kong.

We got to Hong Kong yesterday. Our last day in Taiwan included a visit to a Confucian temple, Longshan temple again with the whole group, and a museum of modern art that I actually liked. They had some seriously weird stuff in it though. I’ll spare you the details.

Our flight from Taiwan to Hong Kong presented some people with difficulties. We were told that each bag (of 2) had a weight limit of 20 kilos (44lbs). When we got there it turned out that we were limited to a total combined weight of 20 kilos. This was a problem for some of the girls who had packed just the international limit of 50lbs each bag. I heard that some had to pay up to 100 USD in overweight fees. I didn’t have to pay anything since I packed light and managed to stuff enough of the heavy stuff into my carry on.

We’re staying at Robert Black College, party of Hong Kong University (HKU). It’s pretty nice and we had a welcome presentation/snacks with some of the students. They were pretty neat and later we went up the Peak and had dinner with them. The Peak is the place where you can see all of the lower Hong Kong city. We had to take a tram to get up there (I think you could walk if you really wanted to…) and I swear that at times it was going up a 90 degree angle. If you think of the incline on a roller coaster, you have a pretty good idea of how it was.

We’re going to have dinner with them and dessert afterwards. I rather dislike the Chinese idea of dessert. Red beans (even if they are sugary) and tofu are not my idea of dessert. The ice cream is creepy too. Weird flavors like red bean (they are obsessed with it), green pea, and corn are not my idea of tasty. However, there are an abnormal amount of bakeries in the area with cheese cake and tiramisu galore so I’m satisfied.