An old friend of Omar (Dave) was visiting family and friends at that time, and we decided to meet up with him. Dave introduced us to some friends who live in Hong Kong, and he also showed us around Kowloon on Saturday. I took Friday off to go early and had a flight at 8 in the morning. To my surprise I could share a taxi to the airport with Jason, with whom we had spent NewYears eve in Bangkok. He was also on his way to Hong Kong, but only as a stopover on his way back to Canada. My journey took about 4 hours, his 25!!
My first impression of Hong Kong was that it had changed compared to two years ago. The city looked even more modern and cleaner than I remembered it. Just until I stepped out of the MTR and went searching for our hotel. I had booked a hotel on Hong Kong Island because we both wanted to experience HK from the other side (we stayed in Kowloon last time.) The hotel was close to Sheung Wan, an area I found out later that resembles most to old HK. It looked very much like Kowloon with all the small shops, dried products (smelly dried fish) and butcheries selling fresh meat on the streets. Luckily our hotel (Novotel Century Harbourview) was extremely modern and our room on the 20th floor had recently been refurbished and modernized. This was one of the hippest hotelrooms we had ever had, overlooking the harbour with all its activity.
After I checked in, I walked up the hill to the University of Hong Kong. The campus is big and because many buildings are at a different height there are steps and escalators everywhere. All university buildings are scattered around the place, and are on top of a hill... I saw many non-chinese faces at HKU, which correspond with the brochure. My reason for visiting HKU was the MSc in Finance. I may be very interested in pursuing a Master degree in Finance, and HK has a good one. I spoke to some of the faculty members and they were all very nice.
Omar arrived after his classes on a comfortable Singapore Airlines flight... he was so positive about SingAir, that I think he is never going to fly anything else anymore...
Friday evening we met with Dave and his fiends in the Dragon-I (read dragon eye) currently the place to go in HK. It's a Japanese-Chinese fusion restaurant until about 23h, when it transforms into a trendy and fashionable club-bar. They played a lot of music from the 90ies and we had good fun. Dave’s friends were very nice, so it was great to meet them. Dave stayed with his friends Emily & Frederic. Emily is Dutch and has lived in HK for about 7 years now, Frederic is Belgian. His other friends were from HK, France and the US, and they all have been living in HK for several years now.
On Saturday Omar and I went shopping. This is very easy considering the fact that you have to divide the price by roughly 11 to convert to euro's and then you end up with a figure that makes you say “sold”! Especially when you think of how much everything costs back home in NL. In the afternoon Dave took us to Mong Kok. We started the afternoon in a place where many locals go for a healthy snack. We could choose between jelly with icecream, jelly with birdsnest saliva or jelly with fruit. It tasted good and was a fun experience. We had dinner in a nice small noisy place, where we had a great selection of dishes, both vegetarian, full of fish, meat and lots of peppers.
HK is an amazing place. Omar loves it. Even though I personally prefer Singapore, I also liked it and I was glad that it was a lot cleaner and prettier than I remembered it. Who knows, we might decide to live here at some point in the future.
1 comment:
Leuk stukje, An! Je vermaakt je prima zo te horen.
Liefs, Marloes
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