It’s 10pm and I’m sitting at a starbucks nearby to the apartment. They close in an hour so I’m going to frantically do this post as fast as I can and then edit 150 pictures and upload them to flickr. I’m absolutely dead tired and I almost fell asleep eating dinner but I’ll get to that later. I’m going to apologize ahead of time because this post is just going to be a giant brain dump because I want to go home and sleep.
I did SO much today, my Uncle did an amazing job showing me around all of Kowloon and parts of Hong Kong.
Ok so there’s a story behind my last two posts. I don’t have internet at the apartment so I had to type them out ahead of time then put the word docs on my cell phone. I left the apartment at 6:30 and literally walked around for 4 blocks looking at my wifi connections trying every unsecured connection. On the way, I found a bakery that sold my favorite pastry that I can only find in HK, tuna pastries! It’s literally a puff pastry with tuna fish inside, don’t knock it until you try it.
I finally found a wifi connection right outside a closed KFC. I literally stood there for an hour checking email, facebook, and posting those two blog posts.
My Uncle William picked me up at 9 this morning and took me around the corner for dim sum. OMG SO GOOD, nothing in Minnesota can compare with the stuff I had this morning.
I’m going to post pictures so I don’t have to take time to describe each and every thing.
After breakfast we jumped in his car and he showed me all the parts of Kowloon. We started at Sha Tian, drove up the mountain and then back down. It’s crazy that we passed all these old people along the way, they were seriously more fit than many 20 year olds I know in the US. I was a little disappointed when we were up there because the view was amazing but the smog was covering up most of the landscape.
After the mountain we drove through the peninsula and through the new territories. It’s seriously amazing what Hong Kong is doing to promote new ideas, science, and technology. They built what’s called Science Park, a multi phase set of buildings where people can come and do research. The buildings looked super awesome and they were moving on to phase 3 which means that they must be getting a return on their investments already.
Our next destination was a water reservoir called Tai Mei Tuk. A ginormous lake separated by the ocean by a concrete wall. This had a big portion of Hong Kong’s fresh water supply and I guess it’s a great place for people to come and hang out on the weekends because there were boats for rental, bbq pits, and tons of kites there were stuck in the nearby trees.
After that we stopped for lunch in a really tiny restaurant. My uncle ordered a dish of pig skin and fish balls, noodles with a sweet hoisin-like sauce, and a giant bowl of fruit and gross black jelly that’s supposed to be good for you. We even stopped for some “lo po bang” which means wife crackers, I haven’t had these since I was in Beijing and apparently the bakery we went to is famous for them.
The next place we went to was in Hong Kong which meant we got to drive through the awesome tunnel that goes under the harbor. It’s just insane to me that there’s things like this in the world. We stopped at the #1 and #2 best beaches in Hong Kong as well as visited Stanley Plaza, a tourist trap of a place that had a long strip of bars along the beach. I really wish I had more friends here to visit these places but just knowing about them to add to the checklist for next time will just have to do.
Finally we stopped for dinner and I was exhausted from all the driving and running around. I requested Korean BBQ and that’s exactly what we had! It was sooo good and we had a ton of sides too. Unfortunately since i was so tired I had my head propped against the wall while I fought the sleepyness to eat more bulgogi.
My uncle suggested that if I needed to do my computer stuff I should probably do it tonight because tomorrow we’re going shopping in Mon Kok and there probably won’t be any time.
Ok sorry for the super undescriptive post tonight, I still have 150 pics to crop and upload to Flickr so if I manage to do that in the next half hour, I’ll try to associate the post to the picture.
Now that I know where I can go to use internet I’ll probably be back in about 9 hours to do a better post. I do have to add one thing. So the apartment that I’m staying at that I thought was a guest apartment is actually the same apartment that my mom grew up in! My family has kept it all these years and renovated it about 5 years ago. That seriously smacked me in the face because my uncle pointed out the elementary school that she went to that was nearby. To be honest, my parents don’t really talk about family history or anything so knowing that I’m living in the place that my mom spent the first 16 years of her life is pretty cool.
