Missing… Presumed Having A Good Time

Alright, I’m sorry, but I’m about a month behind in my blogging.  But since no one is complaining, I only blog when I have time. 

Back to civilization.  As we crossed the boarder from China to Hong Kong, it’s amazing to see the lengths to which the government goes to keep Chinese people without the right credentials from getting into another part of “China”.  A wide river seperates free HK and not so free China.  It sorta reminded me of the boarder between San Diego and Tiajuana except the boarder there is much easier to cross.  Hong Kong and Macau are supposed to be part of China, but if you enter either, you need another Visa to get back into mainland China.  You also have to go thru immigration to get into both “countries”.  So when I should have only had to enter China once to visit all 3.  My stay in China cost me 2 pages for visas, and 6 stamps in my passport to get into and out of Hong Kong and Macau.  I’m quickly running out of pages in my passport and may have to make a stop somewhere to get some more pages added to it.

All that aside, let me just say one thing!  I love Hong Kong!  The food is just so incredibly good.  I could have had Dim Sum everyday.  C’s friend Anderson came from Taiwan to join us and we dragged him out to the Wanchai Bar district our first night.  It was a trip finally coming back to Hong Kong after 13 years and 15 years since I worked there.  Wanchai was mostly the same except all the bars had changed names and the crowd was more expat than locals.  The sports field that I used to walk passed everyday was now a full fledged sports complex with basket ball courts and soccer fields.  I was happily surprised to find Hong Kong pretty much the way I left it before the communists took over.  There were a few more tall buildings, but not much else had changed.

I called a couple, Denis and Anna, that I had met on Hwashan in China a few weeks earlier who live in Hong Kong.  They were absolutely GREAT!!!!  They came by and picked us up and took us to a very yummy Dim Sum and introduced us to a new item that I hadn’t even heard of before.  Cha Siu Bolaw bao, Pineapple BBQ Pork Buns.  Yummy!  After treating us to lunch, they drove us out to Repulse Bay, Stanley and Victoria Peak.  At Stanley, C saw the cutest little girl and asked her dad if she could take a picture of her. The best is when she struck a pose for the photo.  Wouldn’t she make an excellent sister for Kyle, Simon and Elsa?

I have been craving fresh seafood ever since I decided to stop in Hong Kong on my Asia trip.  I’ll always remember the first time my dad’s friend, Michael Tse, took me to a seafood restaurant where you could choose the exact live seafood you were going to eat.  So Anna and Denis took us to Sai Kung to experience that again.  We chose a HUGE stonefish, some prawns, scallops, lai new ha (big lobster tail looking things)… and had them all cooked to order as we dined out by the water al fresco.  Yummy Again!  Now that was a long day.  They picked us up at 12:30pm and dropped us off at 12:30am.  Did I mention that I love the food in Hong Kong?

The next day, I had some more Dim Sum with my aunt and uncle.  I’d never get sick of it.  My uncle took us out to Lantau Island to Dai Yu San (Big Budha Mountain) to go see the worlds largest seated outdoor budha.  It’s supposed to be like 150ft tall or something like that, but I’ll never know because that day the mountain decided to be Dai Mo San (Big Fog Mountain) and I never actually got to see more than the big budha’s fingers. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to spend enough time in Hong Kong this time, but that just means I’ll have to return. 

Tags: Hong Kong, Travel

This entry was posted on Friday, May 26th, 2006 at 8:11 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.