I’m here on the first morning of HK, Katy’s asleep again after sleeping for pretty much the whole plane journey. Trying to book an appointment to get my Hong Kong ID card (Free to register – UK government take note). The appointments are every 15 mins till 4:30pm but I can’t guarantee Katy will be awake by then.
I’m staying here for a month, http://www.manhattanheights.com.hk/ http://is.gd/bRGOC Also worth noting that as well as street view and Google Earth, Hong Kong has Google 3D earth – why not?
Here’s a recap of getting here and the first day.
After a late Pizza express lunch in London, Katy and I got into a taxi from Charring Cross to the Airport (work were paying = WWP). Wearing my newly gifted St. Christopher, I hoped this extra luck would aid our travels to HK but as we stopped to get cash out to pay the driver, the cash machine was out of order. Things were plane (link) sailing after that as we got to the airport. The security check gave us our next problem as the stupid electric tray runners in T5 managed to throw out Katy’s watch somehow. Once we realised our mistake we enlisted the help of a lady called Barbara1 and she retrieved the watch from under the machine.
Travel problems 1 – 1 St Christopher.
We then managed to just avoid spending GBP300 on a pair of sunglasses each, Prada and Serengeti. It was a close run thing.
We got on the plane and boarded our seats in premium economy (WWP). The seats were a bit bigger and we had 1 steward between the 30ish seats so whenever you needed anything you got it straight away. I was offered more wine so many times that I was embarrassed when I had to stop accepting. Taunting me with copious amounts of wine when I’ve got a cold is unfair (wouldn’t happen in first class).
I scrolled through the films and saw one thing that shocked me. The screens on planes aren’t the best quality, you need to be facing them directly or you can’t see them, and the screens are also only 6” big. This seems to lend itself well to low action films with a lot of good dialogue as you’ll not have to watch special effects on this tiny screen. With this in mind, why oh why would they put on Avatar on the plane? James Cameron would be turning in his Director’s Chair if he knew his HD 3D “masterpiece” was being shown on a 6” screen.
While Katy slept I watched Invictus, which was a decent film. It does show that rugby is not that cinematic but that apartheid is cinematic gold. Matt Damon’s character doesn’t really do much in the film and I spent the whole time watching Morgan Freeman’s portrayal of Mandela thinking “Is he really a prick in real life?” (Freeman, not Mandela).
They also had the Who Wants to be a Millionaire game on the plane and despite the disappointment of bottling the 500k question early on in the flight in the last hour, we managed to win the million pounds with a question I didn’t understand but the answer was Marcel Marceau (good old 50/50).
Arriving into Hong Kong I had my work Visa validated without much trouble. I had 4 rubber stamps plus another sticker, plus he wrote on it. Some good bureaucracy at work there.
Getting onto the train into central is really easy – tickets were GBP8 each (Stansted Express, take note). The trains are fast, quiet and clean. There’s no food allowed on them. Katy offered me a chewing gum not realising they’re not allowed, and I was looking around for someone to arrest her. Taxi from there to the hotel was about GBP6 for 2 people and 3 cases which took us right outside our apartment.
The apartment building seems like a classy affair. The place is 60 fricking stories high. There’s separate lifts to take you up to either floors 1-35 or 36-60. And it takes about 20 seconds to get us up to the 31st floor where the apartment is. 31 floors is high, we have a mountain view apartment which means we don’t have a view of the sea. This is the view out of my lounge and below that is the view out of my bedroom window of the tallest and thinnest block of flats I’ve ever seen.
The Lounge is a decent size with a table and chairs and a flatscreen TV. The kitchen is tiny - about half the size of what we'd consider to be a small kitchen. Bathroom is fine with a very low bath but a good shower. The bedroom is a good size but has the hardest mattress I’ve ever sat down on. It feels like it’s just a wooden plank but sleeping on it was really comfortable and had a good night’s sleep. How much of that was jet-lag and how much was tolerance of the bed time will tell.
There seems to be a bit going on in Kennedy Town where our apartment is. We found a decent supermarket and there's a wet fish shop a couple of doors down where all the fish are still swimming around and the shellfish are still clinging to their rocks (think it'll take me a while to buy from there). Next to that there's a real expat shop. Load of imported meats and cheeses (blue Cheese was GBP6). They have a really good wine selection and not shockingly expensive as I thought. You can get a few different bottles for under a fiver. Picked up a 12 pack of San Migeuls (330ml cans) for 56HKD which is roughly GBP5 which is actually a bit of a bargain in the UK, let alone for what I thought it would cost here. It still seems that beers out and bottled beers are expensive.
In the evening we decided to head into central as it was our first night. We tracked down the local bus depot, discovered which bus took us into central (the number 18) and got on. After flashing a HKD20 note at the driver we realised we’d encountered our first non-English speaker. He was explaining to us that without an Octopus card (read: Oyster Card) we weren’t able to travel on the bus... so we set of on our walk into town not realising our exact location on the island. After a minute of walking it became apparent that we weren’t within walking distance of the centre. We hailed a cab instantly and got a quick HKD42 taxi into Central. Central was crazy busy, so many people on every street and every corner, a lot just hanging around or taking a rest from their early evening shopping. We picked up our Octopus card at the station and checked the map for where to go. We headed towards BoHo and we found the Central and Mid-levels Escalator, 
which I believe is the biggest escalator network (or something) in the world. You get on and off the escalators occasionally and can go down stairs at each point to find a little section of restaurants and bars. We thought that the best thing to do would be to travel all the way to the top of the escalator, seeing as we’d started. And passing Robinson Road this seemed like a good idea. However, it turns out that all the good bars are at the middle section (Soho and Boho...and probably Noho, although we’re not quite sure where that is yet) and that there’s basically nothing of interest at the top. That was a real shame.
After discovering the escalator and triumphing in reaching the top, we decided we’d earned a beer. We then discovered that if you miss the 5 hour long happy hours, drinks are really expensive! But we found somewhere in Soho to have some good Asian tapas and some expensive drinks, so we were fairly happy. 9.30pm hit and we realised just how long we’d been travelling and that we actually were jet-lagged after all, so decided to head home and think about what Day 2 would offer.
Footnotes 1. She may not have been called Barbara.
2. The exchange rate we got was 10.8842 or somewhere close to that. Divide any HKD by ten and you can’t go far wrong.
3. You get about 1-1 on potato wedges too, but only if you eat them with chopsticks
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Sounds great, will there be more?
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