Hong Kong day 1

Warning: This was exciting for me, so it is likely to be rather long and have a lot of pictures. Feel free to only read as much as you want to.

Our hotel room in Hong Kong was smaller than an American hotel room would be, but it was very nice. It's a bit messy in this picture, but it gives you an idea.

In the picture, I'm standing next to the bathroom, so you can't see it. The bathroom had a translucent glass sliding door, which felt a tiny bit odd, but we survived. As you can see, the whole back wall was a window, and we were twelve stories up, so we had a very cool view of the city.

I roomed with a girl named Camila, whom I had met during training and was on the plane over with me. She is super cute, and we hung out most of the trip. She got engaged right before coming here, so I got to hear some good engagement/dating stories.

We went to a 7/11 for breakfast. They are everywhere. I think we found three of them within one block of our hotel. It is a very cool city to just walk around in. The shops line the street and are open to the street, so you can just walk in. The streets themselves are fairly narrow, and have signs for the stores sticking out into the road. Of course, everything is in both English and Mandarin since Hong Kong was owned by Brittain for so long (This is also why they drive on the wrong side of the road there).

After breakfast, we went on a guided tour of the city with about 20 other ILP people. The first place we went was was the top of some big hill (I don't remember the name--something peak) where there was an amazing view.

We walked around for a bit and took lots of pictures, then drove another place whose name I don't remember, which is something like the original Hong Kong fishing villiage. We took a boat tour of the harbor and got to see all the fishing boats all lined up.

Our boat

Our boat driver. He didn't speak any English, so he mostly just piloted us around.

The third stop on our little tour was the market place.

They had shops selling jewelry, watches, clothes, paintings, and all sorts of other things. I didn't buy anything but it was very cool to look, and Camila managed to argue a necklace price down from HK$300 to HK$100 (about US$40 to US$13.50). She was proud of that. I'm definitely not looking forward to the whole bargaining culture in China.

That was the end of the tour, and we were on our own for lunch. It turns out that you can actually get normal things to eat in Hong Kong. There were chicken feet and pig intestines on the menu, but I wasn't feeling adventurous.

In the afternoon we spent some time figuring out the metro system and then headed over to the Hong Kong temple. We wanted to do baptisms, but it was closed for another hour and a half. Some people waited the hour and a half in a nearby church building, but my group decided that we were tired and hungry and would rather go home and eat dinner. I sort of wish I had stayed and gone in, but it was good to rest some.

In the evening we walked from our hotel down to the pier to watch a big light show to music. It was a bit like those youtube videos of people's christmas decorations set flash in time to music, except it was whole buildings lighting up. It was cool, but my body was starting to realize that it had slept only about 10 hours in the last 3 days, and 5 of that was on the airplane, so I was a bit too tired to appreciate it. We ate dinner after we got back at that same restaurant as lunch, then went straight to bed without visiting a night market like we had planned.