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So, another week gone by and time for another blog...from HONG KONG!!Absolutely loving it here and we've only been here just over a day but I'll get to that, first a quick run down of the rest of the week's events...
We arrived in Hangzhou around 10am after getting up super early in rainy (again) Shanghai (6am starts are no fun, especially when you have to do the Youth Hostel thing of trying not to wake everyone else up in the room!), after a great train journey in a soft seat compartment with loads of leg rooms and the seats were certainly soft!The grey clouds seemed to follow us though as Hangzhou was pretty rainy when we arrived. We weren't really up for a busy day anyway, especially after only a few hours sleep, so we spent most of the day just chilling out in the cafe attached to the hostel, though we did bump into Jake and Johnathan, twin brothers who we'd chatted to in Shanghai who are travelling for a few weeks before they head to uni in September, and as they'd already been in Hangzhou a few weeks they took us to the nearby night market and shopping street, where we grabbed some dinner in a kind of cafeteria place.
I tried one of the local specialities, beggar's chicken, which is a whole chicken (though smaller than chickens at home, I wasn't being that much of a pig!) which I think is boiled or steamed and wrapped in lotus leaves.And yes, when I say whole chicken, I mean whole chicken... afte I unwrapped my little poultry package I discovered the poor thing still had head, feet and wings attached which was a little unappetising, but I figured it was a cultural experience so I just turned it over so the head wasn't visible and tucked in!!Was really good actually, really juicy and tender, though the woman had given me plastic gloves to eat it with so it did all feel a bit animalistic ripping meat off a whole bird!!Anyway, the night market was cool too, lots of chinese-y tat for sale, including hangzhou's speciailities- dragon well tea, silk and-weirdest of all- scissors of all things!! It was great to hang out with the guys too and get a few ideas for what to do round town while we were there.
On the Friday we hired bikes by paying a deposit and getting a card,which you swipe when you want to get a bike out or lock it up again and it logs how long you use them and the money is deducted from the deposit when you bring the card back at the end of the day. A good system, and I think similar to ones in places like Paris, the first hour of biking is free too,and then every hour after that only costs the equivalent of 10p, so it's a great way to get around. The weather still wasn't so great, a bit drizzly at times and very overcast, but not too cold so we were able to cycle a little, then we walked around a good bit of the city's main attraction, the massive lake. It's a very beautiful place, with lots of parkland, temples, cool bridges and ponds with coy fish (and terrapins!) in them, very typically chinese I guess. We were a bit annoyed though as we'd planned to ride our bikes over the causeway linking one side of the lake to the other, but when we got to the begining there was a big 'no bikes' sign so we parked up and started to walk...a few minutes after we'd left the bikes and got on the causeway, we realised that pretty much all the chinese people were ignoring the sign and just going for it with their bikes, grrrr!!I guess it's just a british/irish thing about obeying the rules, but we grudgingly just kept on walking!
On Saturday we headed to the Silk Museum up the road on the bus, which was actually really interesting, though there were lots of silk worm displays and diagrams and bits of silk worm pickled in jars and stuff which was a bit gross. It's pretty impresssive to think how some day thousands of years ago someone discovered that they could make cloth from something that comes out of an insects bum!There were lots of examples of all the different types of silk weaving and designs, some of which were spectacular, and in the basement of the place there was a shop with a weird kind of auction room/demonstration room bit in it where we watched a guy showing lots of chinese tourists the difference between real silk and synethic material using a lighter, using the catchphrase- 'no burn, no buy!'...we just thought that if you went into a shop and asked to put a lighter to some of their merchandise you'd never get to buy anything cos whos gonna let you do that?!apparently it's the done thing in Hangzhou though!!That afternoon after loads of furious map reading and walking around it circles (well it felt like it anyway) trying to find the right bus as none of the stops were marked on the map so we couldn't find the routes that the buses were taking, we eventually found our way to the Silk Street downtown, where there are hundreds of shops all in the one place dedicated to all things silk of course!! We spent a fair bit of time haggling and grabbed ourselves a few bargains before we headed back to the hostel to freshen up then headed out to the cinema to see Iron Man 2. After getting a bit lost (again!) after we got off the bus, we found the cinema and grabbed a quick dinner at a nearby cafeteria, where I had a skewer of what I thought was chicken, but definitely wasnt chicken at all as it had a very different texture and a slightly fishy taste...I'm still pondering it now!
The film was good, really fun to go to the cinema as usually we're so tired after sightseeing all day that we don't do too much most evenings, but it was really funny cos the villain ( Mickey Rourke who I find quite terrifying in real life because he's so weird looking) was Russian, but every time someone mentioned the words 'Russia' or 'Russians' the word was scrambled so it came out all weird...interesting!!!After the film ended we spent a miserable half hour trying to hail a cab in the pouring rain, but eventually we got home and into bed.
I did really like Hangzhou, as it was an interesting city (the size of London population wise, crazy!) but it had a good balance between urban and country life with the gorgeous lake and it's surrounding greenery. It was just a shame that the weather wasn't better for us as the lake was impressive even in the fog and mist of rainy days, so I bet it would be stunning on a sunny day. On Sunday, we stocked up on baked goods for the train journey to Guangzhou from an amazing little french bakery just down the road from our hostel that we'd been having breakfast at where they did such good pastries that we had to have two each every morning (!), paid a last visit to the market street for a few little purchases then headed to the station for our train.
Another good but long train journey, this time 20hours...hard sleeper again but I really think there's not much difference between it and soft sleepers, besides I'd rather pay less!We bought some noddles for dinner, and had our pastries for breakfast, and with lots of reading and looking out the window at the surprisingly lush and green scenery, as well as a relatively good night's sleep (well, for a train sleep anyway), the journey went quite quickly and before we knew it we arrived in Guangzhou at 11.30am on Monday morning. and Guangzhou was definitely not rainy. In fact, it was swelteringly hot, and unluckily for us the train to Hong Kong leaves from the East station, on the other side of town to the station we'd arrived into, so we had to queue for about half and hour in the sticky, smelly heat for a taxi with our bone crunchingly (ok maybe Im exaggerating a bit but my back was pretty sore from hard-sleepering it!) painful big bags on our backs. We were NOT happy bunnies. Eventually though, after much more sweating- I was literally soaked with sweat, disgusting- at the east station, we eventually found the booking office for the Hong Kong train and managed a sneaky starbucks to cool off before settling onto the train for the relatively short 90minute journey. We got free water on the train too, which perked us up a bit- I always love the free stuff!!
Anyway, we eventually got into Tsim Sha Tsui East station on Kowloon island Hong Kong at about 4ish yesterday afternoon, and taxi-ed it to our hotel. We're staying in Mirador Mansions, which is near Chunking Mansions, an allegedly infamous sprawling complex filled with cheap guest houses where most travellers stay. We'd heard mixed reports (from 'don't stay there!!' to 'ah it's ok, just dont stay in Messy Guest house!'), but actually the area we are in is amazing- right near all the proper designer shops like Prada, Gucci, Chanel etc etc so nice for window shopping and really central. Although the Mirador mansions building itself is a bit crumbling and there are a few guys outside trying to sell fake bags and watches, our teeny tiny room (you could probably just about swing a kitten in it, but it would proably bump its' head off the TV) is spotlessly clean, with silk pillow cases (oh lala!) and even a rain shower with different settings (though the shower does leak a little, but the landlady is doing our laundry for free as 'compensation'!). Also, we both still feel very safe as its pretty much a 24 hour area so there are always shops open and people about to help, and we had prepared ourselves for a place a bit like the Paharganj area in Delhi which is frankly a really dodgy place, but its not in the slightest!
Last night we treated ourselves to an amazing meal of Lemon chicken, beef with nodles and pak choi with garlic at a great restaurant down the road, and then we caught the metro (another excellent public transport system, and so cheap-take note London!) to Temple Street Market where we perused the seemingly hundreds of stalls worth of 'designer' bags and clothes, chines knick knacks and Jade got her palm read, exciting stuff!
Today we had a fairly productive day- we caught the Star ferry (took about 10mins, a fun way to travel and a bargain at 25p!)to from the area we are in on Kowloon (Tsim Sha Tsui) to Wan Chai on Hong Kong Island, and spent an hour sorting through a bit of red tape to get our visas organised. We're going to pick them up on Thursday, though I'm so lucky to have my Irish passport as poor Jade's having to pay a lot more than me because she is on a british passport. Then we had Pret a Manger for brunch (bit naughty of us to eat western food but we were so hungry and the chocolate muffins are hard to resist!)before heading up to Victoria Peak on the Tram which was lots of fun, though Jade kept looking worriedly at me as we were scaling the gravity defying hill and saying 'what would happen if the cable snapped now?!', which was a bit unnerving!! We got a great view from the top of the roof of the tram building, and although today has been pretty overcast (and again very close and sweaty, urgh!), we were able to see all the big sky scrapers, and note the contrast between then on one sideof the peak and lots of greenery on the other. I really love that about China, that although the cities are very developed and yes, can be very polluted, you don't have to look far to find trees. We also saw loads of birds of prey circling the peak, then headed back down on the tram (facing backwards downhill wasn't as fun!) to Queen's Road Central, where we got lost in H&M for an hour or so. After that, we caught 800m worth of escalators uphill (the world's longest stretch dontcha know) to mid-levels- kind of weird and when we got the the top we just walked back down again, but Soho, the area it's in, is really cool with loads of different types restaurants (including lebanese, russian and greek to name a few!), and we walked through Graham Street market too which runs parallel to the escalators, which has all sorts of interesting fruits, vegetables and lots of weird and wonderful meat and fish- I'm pretty sure I saw an animal's intestines today,mmm!
We had a naughty McDonalds for tea (we had to check whether it was different from home or not- it isn' really though they have these desserts called Taro pies which are weird and wonderful) then headed down to the Avenue of the Stars which is a 5 minute walk from our guest house, to wach the Symphony of Light show, a light show run by the HK Tourist Bureau that all the sky scrapers are utilised for. Quite kitschy and fun, and the sky line at night is just gorgeous, though we were commenting that the daily light show must be quite confusing for al the planes coming into land at HK airport! We headed back to Temple Market again for a little bit more shopping (some of the stuff is just too good a bargain to resist!), and now I'm just about to sign off and head to bed cos we are going to DISNEYLAND tomorrow!!!!Very childish of us I guess, but we've said its the one silly thing we really want to do, and I need to realise my ambition to go on Space Mountain as alas the one time I've been to Disneyland Paris so far I was too tiny for it- hopefully I'll exceed the height restriction this time, though I have to say I'm a little worried...!!
Anyway, best go and rest up for the big day tomorrow. Don't want to be grump for when I'm meeting Mickey!
lots of love from Hong Kong xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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