The Big Blank

Three days in Hong Kong

I landed in Hong Kong around 12:15pm. I had to reach the office by 2:30pm to at least catch the afternoon session of the training. There was some delay at the immigration. He prolly didn't like my face or something. But I finally got through without trouble. I found out the fastest way to get to the city was the Airport Express. Cost me a cool HK$100. Though I reached the city in 45 mnts flat. Actually earlier I was thinking of making to it to the lunch at 1:00pm or may be the later part of it. But finding out the hotel and checking-in etc. took a lot of time. In fact I was late by 5 minutes for the afternoon session. The morning session was plain chit chat and afternoon was also just intro to the support functions of the company. So the most important stuff I missed was the lunch, which people told me was not that good. So all the bad luck I had since the start of my trip seems to be wearing off.

HK has all mode of transports imaginable. Buses, Metro, Tram, Express trains, ferries and of course taxis. And yeah one more The Peak Tram. This thing has been around for some 100 years and like all things in HK extremely well maintained. It takes you to one of the numerous peaks around HK. It goes up on a steep slope, which sometimes is upto 45 degrees. You get beautiful panorama view of the city while going up. On the top of course you can see the whole city. The top is like a small city with numerous restaurants and shops. Interestingly almost all the shops had these last day stock clearing sale notice on them. The notices sure looked old. We were a little short on cash as we had to still get our first salries/reimbursements. But when you see a Hagan Das you got to have some.So we shared like 2 scoops among us seven. There was this old man selling battery operated crawling soldiers for 70$ which right after were offered for 50. Anyway they were kind of interesting. We sort of got lost finding the tram station. It was right in fornt of that Hagan Das. We climbed up and down the whole place and threatened to bump the guy, who was kind of leading us, off.

We also went to this place, Kowloon, which is supposed to be a place to get cheap things. The cheapest way to go there is this star ferry. You cut across the sea on the ferry and on the way get a terrific view of HK in HK$1.7. I bought a good fake Tomy Hilfiger watch for an equivalent of 120 rupees. A few had to desperately get phone cards to call there "dear ones". Rest decided to gain from these peoples calling charges experience. So next day we came back to Kowloon for the rest and for those who already exhausted their cards. We came in an open top double decker bus this time. The one in that DDLJ song. It felt great in that good weather and specially after the long day at office. Yeah there was office going too from 9AM to 5ish. I think lets give it a miss. We explored the whole place for an Indian Diner and though found a few but couldn't make our selves spend the dough for the goodies. Darn the habit of converting $ to Rs. And later almost has to do without a dinner as everything was almost closed. The food stalls there take last order till 930pm. I had to catch the morning flight for Tokyo and others had to go to the office early so we headed for the hotel quite early.

Next- Tokyo Landing

posted by Pankaj Jain @ 6:30 AM