We landed in Hong Kong in the mid-afternoon on Friday, May
23. Of course, we were very happy to
finally arrive after the trials and tribulations of the prior couple days (a
total of 37 hours travelling!), though Todd could have used another hour to
wrap up watching the first season of Under the Dome (oh well, we’ll save that
for the return flight; Gwen is rolling her eyes). Getting through customs was a breeze. One oddity that we noticed, however, is that
Hong Kong passport control doesn’t give you a stamp in your passport. Instead, they give you a little slip of paper
indicating how long you’re allowed to stay in the country – best not to lose
that!
As the Hong Kong airport is located on Lantau Island, we
needed to catch a bus from the airport to our hotel, the Langham Place in Mong
Kok on Kowloon peninsula. Fortunately,
while we were in Dubai, Gwen was able to correspond with the Langham Place and
let them know about our delay. When we
walked up to the hotel’s desk at the airport, the folks there were expecting
us. After spending about half an hour
waiting for the bus, surrounded by hilarious Chinese tour groups wearing
matching hats or neon t-shirts, we were loaded onto a bus and got underway.
While the bus ride took us through mostly industrial areas, the bus did take us
past a few things of interest, including a gigantic shipping port and the cable
cars on Lantau Island that you can ride up to the top of a mountain for great
views and to see a large Buddha statute.
We got to the Langham Place around 5pm. The hotel reminds us somewhat of the Hotel
Akasaka Excel where we stayed in Tokyo.
Like the Akasaka, the entrance on the street level leads only to an
elevator bay, which in turn takes you to the lobby one floor up. The rooms are
similar in format too. The check-in
process was quite smooth, and our bags were delivered to our room by a zealous
bell-hop who gave us an extensive tour of the amenities of the room. Very nice over all!
After washing up (very welcome after our most recent bout of
travelling), we decided to explore the area around the hotel. Mong Kok and the neighborhoods directly south
along Nathan Road are extremely busy at night.
We walked about 20 minutes from Mong Kok to Jordan to find the Temple
Street Night Market, a large, famous street market spanning a few blocks where
folks sell a wide variety of items. Over
all, the market was very fun to see, but we did not stop to buy anything. Many of the items for sale were touristy
(e.g., I Heart Hong Kong t-shirts) and items started to repeat after a while
(e.g., we saw several booths selling the same jade statutes, binoculars, and so
on).
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| Gate entrance to Temple Street Market |
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| Nathan Road |
After that, we walked back toward our hotel in search of
dinner. As mentioned, these
neighborhoods were hopping at nighttime, and most every restaurant was packed
even though it was now nearly 9:00pm.
Eventually, we ended up at Langham Place Mall, a gigantic and beautiful
mall attached to our hotel, where we found a number of interesting restaurant
options, including a restaurant serving various items on toast (such as meat
floss on toast, and peanut butter toast), and a dessert restaurant focused exclusively
on mochis. We noticed that, though these
restaurants were packed, they also were machines at getting customers seated,
fed and out of their seats, and then cleaning up their tables in preparation
for the next guests. We settled on a
raman restaurant, where we enjoyed the giant steaming bowls of noodles shown
below. So far, we haven’t had too much
luck attempting to order in English, but the point at the menu and smile method
seems to work fine! All told, these
giant bowls together were about $20 U.S.
Well-fed and ready for sleep, we ambled back to our hotel
through the walk bridge connecting to the mall.
Gwen cranked out yesterday’s blog post before she conked out (Todd was
already asleep).
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