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Saturday, 13 February 2010

Chinese New Year in Hong Kong

With it being one of the major cities of the world, we were looking forward spending some time here, especially in the build up of the Chinese new year. We set off early on Friday morning from Guangzhou and it took 3 hours to get to Hong Kong including customs. I had a slight problem with my photo (it's becoming normal now), probably because I had long hair and a bit of a beard but they let me through after i showed them my driving license.




Hong kong was a lot busier than I thought with people still shopping at 4am for their bargains but with he metro system in place, it makes it so much easier getting around. Once we checked into our hostel, our first priority was to get a new chinese visa, which took 7 days ( we wanted to stay for 5) and cost 40 pound compared to the 16 pound in China. After the paperwork, we met up with Greg and Elliot, who we met in Beijing and had alraeady planned our meeting in Hong Kong and started planning our week in Hong Kong.




There was not much interesting to see in Hong Kong apart from the Victoria peak, which we visted at night to avoid the mist that was around over the past few days. It was amazing to see the whole city in lights with the tall buildings towering over everything. We also took a stroll along the avenue of stars, where there are plaques of famous chinese stars. The only ones we knew were Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Bruce Lee (he had his own statue too). We also spent a day trekking up to the Big Buddha, which involved walking through the forrest. We've already seen 2 big buddha's so this wasn't too amazing but the trek up was amazing and a lot better than getting the cable car up.


Like i said, the main purpose of Hong Kong was to experience the Chinese New Year in the big city. The parade was busy as you can imagine but very different to the traditional chinese one that we expected. It was more of an exhibition of different countries around the world representing what they do in their part of the world. We had Notting Hill carnival represting the UK!! The second day, we went to see the fireworks display of the sky scrapers of Hong Kong but that was over in a bang (haha).




Elliot, the skaterboy from the south, has decided to join us for the rest of China and travel Vietnam with us until he has to leave- I think he has found his love for the northerners and this was his reason to join us (true story). All in All Hong Kong is a crazy city that never sleeps. It's expensive in relation to budgeting and the food over there is not too brilliant BUT at least the majority of them speak English. We were actually looking forward to coming back into China for the food-now that's crazy!

Hong Kong photo link:

http://www3.snapfish.com/snapfish/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=3213019011/a=2264773011_2264773011/otsc=SHR/otsi=SALBlink/COBRAND_NAME=snapfish/

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