Hong Kong and Macau

Hong Kong from above

I should not have waited this long to recap all of this stuff. I'm struggling to remember everything that happened on the trip and at this point, after a long weekend of partying in Prague, I'm sure I'm leaving a lot out. But anyway...

Hong Kong
We arrived in Hong Kong on Friday afternoon ready for anything other than Shanghai and cold weather. The train ride into the city from the airport looked like Southern California with sunshine and hills rolling down into ocean. It was immediately 1000% better than Shanghai based solely on the warm weather.

Hong Kong itself is divided into roughly two areas, Kowloon, and Hong Kong Island. Kowloon is the grittier, more Chinese part of the city, and Hong Kong is the more glamorous, high-end, British section. We decided to stay in Kowloon because it was cheaper and its bay is where Cassandra from Wayne's World is from.

We got to our place, the only hostel of the trip, and immediately got ready to go out on the town. That night we went to Lan Kwai Fong which is a big street of bars and clubs that is really popular with expats in Hong Kong. It was Friday night so it was really packed with lots of douche scrotes in suits pretending to be important. At any rate it was really fun. At some point some crazy girl told Gunmetal to close his eyes and open his hand and she dumped a load of pills in it. I don't remember the rest of the night.


The next day we moved to a better hostel (the AMERICAN hostel) and covered a lot of sightseeing activities. We did the old double decker bus tour of Hong Kong which I have no pictures of because I forgot my camera that day. Toward the end of the day we rode up the side of a mountain in a cable car to check out the view from the hills. It was sick.

On one of the nights we were in Hong Kong we decided to check out their "world famous light show" that happens every night at 8pm or so. We were all very excited for a sweet lazer light show to blow our minds Pink Floyd style...We were sorely disappointed when we realized it was just a series of slow blinking lazers coming off of each building on the Hong Kong side while terribly cheesy chinese music played and announcers chattered in Cantonese over some loud speaker. Even the 3 year old asian babies were underwhelmed.

As a final assessment of Hong Kong I have to say that it is an amazing city. Despite the shitty light show (it had to have at least one flaw) it is the perfect mix of Asia and London or San Francisco. It is beautiful. It is surrounded by rolling hills and has a skyline that is really cool. The people are pretty nice and it's very vanilla face friendly. The weather is awesome - in January it was 60 - 70 degrees the whole time. Even the language, Cantonese, sounds way better to me than Mandarin. Hong Kong has everything anyone could ever want in a city and I could see myself living there for an extended period of time.

Macau

Some Macau Church Ruins

We hit Macau for a day after we covered Hong Kong and Kowloon pretty thoroughly. Macau was also a pretty interesting place. I had heard bad things so my expectations were low, but it was well worth seeing in my opinion.

Macau was a Portugese colony for about 400 years. It looks like a European city and actually has a few sites to see. There is one area in the center that has ruins of an old church. Here you can walk a street and sample 50 types of jerky meats ranging from pig to cow to chicken...or so it is advertised. I'm pretty sure it's all either dogmeat or human meat from casino workers who weren't pulling their weight anymore. Aside from the jerky there is also good Portugese, African, and Chinese food.

Looking down on Mystery Meat Street

We hit the casinos for a while and I made 700 HKD (100USD) at the blackjack tables. The casinos there are weird because there are literally 5x more workers than there are patrons. If you've ever been anywhere in Asia outside of Korea or Japan, you probably realize that this does not automatically translate into a more efficient operating system. Getting a drink was nearly impossible.

Overall Macau was cool because I made money and got to feast on jerky. Go here if you like to do these two things.