Saturday, February 19, 2011

Thoughts About Hong Kong

I’m still getting used to Hong Kong. It’s so different from home in every way.

Right now it’s raining, but even when it rains it is still warm. At home when it rains, it’s automatically colder. Usually much colder. Sometimes when it rains here, it seems hotter. When it rains at home, it can rain all day. Sometimes for days on end. When it rains here, it rains for an hour and stops. One time it started pouring really hard and stopped five minutes later. Even when it rains every day, it never rains all day. There’s always a break. Usually quite a few every day.

The money here is pretty weird. It’s all different colors and the smaller bills are coins, but there’s a HK$10 bill and HK$10 coin. There’s no HK$1 bill. It’s only a coin. The smaller coins seem pretty useless. You can’t do anything with the 10 cent coin. That’s worth about a penny. I guess you can’t do anything with a penny either. The HK$10 bill is the weirdest. It looks like a purple neon sign. There’s even a hole in it. It’s some kind of security hologram deal, but you can see right through it. When I first saw it I thought it was fake. The higher bills look more like real money. The HK$100 bill has a big ol’ stately lion on it. If it sounds like I’m rich walking around with $100 bills, it’s only $13 American.

The food here is awesome. But not everyone speaks English. I’m sure I’ll learn some Chinese just to order food. I’ll have to.

When we first got here, we ate at a lot of tourist and “western” restaurants. Not western as in steak and BBQ, but western as in "American" food. Not really American, though. More like British, or the Chinese version of British. Lots of fast food chains are here and lots of restaurants with familiar food and people who speak English, but those places are the most expensive. Eating where the Chinese people eat is much, much cheaper – $1 for a meal versus $20. Everything about Hong Kong seems expensive, but there is cheap food in every direction. You just have to find it – and learn to order it in Chinese.

There seem to be people selling food on the streets any time of the day – literally. Walk around at midnight and you’ll see people selling food from their little carts. I’m a little afraid of cart food. It must be ok if someone is eating it every day, but I don’t know what anything is and I’m really not sure how to order any of it, except by pointing. I’m also not quite ready to dive headfirst into suspicious looking chunks of food-like substances. I’ve seen a few things that take away my appetite pretty fast.

Something Hong Kong really has going for it is public transportation. The subways go everywhere you want to go. There’s a private subway line just for Disneyland. The buses seem to go everywhere, but I haven’t figured out how to use them yet. There are double-decker buses like in London. I thought they were for sightseeing at first, but they’re just regular buses. There are boats that go all over the place, which makes sense since Hong Kong is really a bunch of islands and a peninsula. There are taxis everywhere, but I don’t see the need since they’re more expensive than anything else and I’m told most of the drivers don’t speak English.

The subway is really the way to go. It’s called the MTR and it couldn’t be easier. All the signs are in English & Chinese, everything’s color coded, it seems pretty efficient and on time, it’s really clean for such a large city and some of the stations are interesting all by themselves. The Disneyland station is really something to see. It’s like an old Paris or Victorian London train station. It doesn’t look like anything in Hong Kong at all. The trains that go to Disneyland are special Disney trains with all kinds of Mickey decorations – even Mickey windows.

2 comments:

  1. I have never been to Hong Kong Disney. I went to Disney World in Orlando, FL. It was wonderful. I like Animal Kingdom the best. Magic Kingdom always have long lines everywhere. I heard that Hong Kong Disney is much smaller in scale and with Chinese style (shorter characters? haha).

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've been to DisneyWorld in FL - Hong Kong Disneyland is MUCH smaller. You can easily see everything in under a day. Everything's the same Disney style, but with a lot more Chinese food. There are also fewer rides, but they're slowly expanding.

    ReplyDelete

No hate, please. There's enough of that in the world already.