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Ahhhhhh.... what a day! Today has been a long day and pretty frustrating overall but good at the same time. It started out by me oversleeping (which I haven't done in a really long time) and running up to the Faculty/Staff Lounge for Passport Distribution but there were some complications with Chinese Immigration and the ship's administration couldn't decide on a procedure so things kept changing and we just ended up sitting there and didn't get off the ship until after noon.
It was a little bit of a shock walking off of the ship here. 2 days ago I was in Vietnam sweating in the jungle among people paddling canoes full of mangos and here I am in the middle of an ultra-modern city bundled up because its cold and rainy. We get off of the ship and the gangway leads right in to the 3rd story of a huge mall. It seems like alot of HK is a bunch of huge malls. We set out to find an ATM...it was hard to gauge how much cash to take out for only one day in Hong Kong, and then got some lunch at the food court in the mall. Its nice becuase everything has pictures! I ended up with a nice bowl of soup with noodles and wontons. After lunch, Leigh Ellen and I went searching for an internet cafe to make some Skype calls but it never worked out for me. We found a place and it should have been no problem, but the headset the guy gave me didn't work. I tried two other headsets and there was some sort of issue with all of them. The guy working there told me the problem was in my head and I had a mini crying breakdown there while everyone else got to talk to their friends and family. After that, we made our way to the MTR station, which is the Hong Kong subway system and went to Mong Kok to the Ladie's Market. Yes, its really called that, and walked around for awhile. I'm getting pretty good at bargaining in the markets! It's going to be kind of strange to have to pay ticket price for things. It makes you want to walk in to the Gap and offer the salesperson $10 for the pants that cost $60! The streets were crowded but everything was nice and clean and lots to look at. I got a bubble-tea like drink that had little rice balls, coconut, red bean, and mango cubes that was soooo good. Definately looking foward to another one of those at some point.
After the market, we took the subway back to Tsing Sha Tsui, where the ship is and took the Star Ferry over to Hong Kong Island. Taking the Star Ferry was on the visitor's list of "Must Do's" in HK so we did it. We just went over quickly and basically turned around and came right back to see the big light show over Victoria Harbor...another HK Must Do, as was the Ladie's Market. The light show was pretty cool, a ton of people were gathered on this observation promenade that looks out over the harbor and has speakers specifically for the soundtrack to the show. After the light show, we went off in search of dinner. LE had gotten a reccomendation for a vegetarian dim sum restaurant so we tried to find that which was pretty frustrating but we did find it eventually but it wasn't dim sum! We stayed anyways and the whole thing was an event! We ordered and after the waitress took our order, she called over the manager who told us she didn't like our order and we should re-think it...basically she just re-ordered for us. We ended up with sweet and sour tofu, some fried noodles and dumplings. Everything was very good but Connie, the manager who thought we had no idea what we were doing even came over and served our food. I'm also becoming quite skilled with the chopsticks! After we finished, the waitress came back over with more food and told us we were getting free desert. Ok great! It was two little bowls of hot purplish desert soup. That's the only way I can describe it. I have no idea what it was or what it was called but it was really good. We couldn't stop laughing.
We finished up and paid for dinner and headed back to the ship. I tried one last time to make a phone call. Earlier in the day, after the Skype incident, I bought a phone card for 50 HKD but that didn't work either and ended up giving it to some guy who was using the payphone next to mine. He was so grateful and bowed to me. 70 HKD spent today and no successful phone calls was frustrating but in the end it wasn't that bad...its only about $10. It was well after 10pm at this point. I still had alot to do to clean up my cabin and finish packing for Beijing. So that was my day here...its super late now too and time for bed!
We leave first thing in the morning and I'll be off of the ship until April 7th. We get back from Shanghai at about midnight on the 7th and then I'll have one day there on April 8th.
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