A week in Hong Kong

Once again, I'm a little behind in these posts (this one is about a month out of date!). This is because I've spent the past few weeks working and studying. 'Studying?' you say? (That's what I was thinking too!) You'll have to wait till the next post or two to learn more...

I had been looking forward to getting to Hong Kong for quite a while. Kate had been there a few times before and had nothing but good things to say, and the added bonus of reaching civilisation again after the few weeks in China also appealed to me :-)

While Hong Kong is under Chinese rule (again, after 150 years with the British at the helm) it has a much more modern feel to it than the rest of China. It is very like a prosperous European city but still maintains the character and culture of China.

Dublin is still working to produce an integrated ticket system which will work on all forms of public transport (dublin bus, cie, luas, etc.) but Hong Kong has had this for the past 20 years in the form of an 'Octopus' magnetic card. You don't even need to take it our of your wallet, just put your wallet or bag near the sensor and the credits are deducted - and it's not just for public transport, you can even use it to pay for your Starbucks coffee! (Sorry cartys1!)

White faces are not unusual so we no longer got the 'outsider' stares that we came to know and love travelling through the rest of China. Accomodation and food was quite a bit more expensive that 'Mainland' China but still cheaper than Dublin prices.

We took a trip to Ocean Park, a fun park on Hong Kong Island

We spent our week just walking around the city and taking if fairly easy. Electronic stuff is particularly cheap here - probably one of the cheapest places in the world for it - so we oogled around a few of the shops and ended up with a pair of the new 8GB ipod nano's, less than 3 weeks on the market when we got them :-)

At 8pm every evening, there's a light show syncronised to music - if you can imagine buildings dancing, this would be it! It was really impressive, and we probably watched it 5 nights out of the 8 we spent there.

We had a fantastic time with our week in Hong Kong and we'll definately be back again. We were sorry we had to go, but there was much more to see and do so we got ourselves some more train tickets and set off on the 2 day journey to Vietnam.

Goodbye Camera :-(

Unfortunately I will not be able to add any new photo's to picasaweb because our camera was stolen :-( The camera itself is covered by our insurance policy ...minus the policy excess (those insurance companies and their damn actuaries!) but unfortunately we also lost our photo's from the past few weeks which were still on the memory card.

We'll buy an new one again soon, but I'm afraid to get one while here in Vietnam where they probably make fake 'Made in China' labels (not exactly an endorsement in the first place) for their Vietnamese products!