We arrive around 5:00pm Hong Kong time, and headed to our hotel. Hong Kong is a huge, bustling Asian city with skyscrapers everywhere you look. It reminded me a little of Shangahi in this regard, but it is much greener and hillier. It seems to be built into a series of islands, or maybe it’s land interrupted by various bays and inlets. There are huge bridges everywhere connecting the pieces of land, and our hotel sat directly next to one of those bridges, right on the water, with magnificent views of the city.
Our first night we asked the concierge for a recommendation for dinner, and he wrote something in Chinese on a card and we handed it to the cab driver. We ended up in a completely non-westernized part of town, in a dirty little hole-in-the-wall restaurant where none of the workers spoke English. Luckily, a guy at one of the other tables was an English teacher at a local school and he translated for us. The only other English I heard was a man who came up to us said, “You from United States? Chicago no get Olympics” then smiled and walked away. That’s one thing you get in China—people are excited to practice any English they know on you and they are very pleased when you understand what they are saying.
After dinner we went to Hong Kong’s famous bar street—Lai Kwon Fang or something like that. It’s about a block of door-to-door bars, each blaring music and competing for customers. It was a nice night, so we sat outside and watched the hoards of people coming and going. It was interesting to see how many mixed couples there were—always male Westener and female Asian, never the other way around. The street was packed when we got there at midnight, and by 2:00am when we went back to the hotel it was almost cleared out.
Pictures: Our first dinner in Asia; Lai Kwon Fong Street.
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