A new year..and my trip to HK

Well, it's been a while since I've updated.  I'm back from vacation, and I have been working at winter camp for the past 2 weeks.  It's not bad so far.  I only teach 4 classes per day, and I get to leave when they are over at 12:10pm.  Needless to say, I've been taking a nap every single afternoon.  I also accomplished watching all 25 episodes of Boys Before Flowers, a K-drama, in just about 6 days total.  Each episode is at least 1 hour long.  You do the math.  If anyone has some time on their hands to read a lot of subtitles, I highly recommend.

I'll take the rest of this blog entry to talk about Hong Kong and Macau.  (It's more for me to remember what we did..sorry, I know this kind of blog is boring)  First of all, the weather is absolutely amazing.  We left Seoul, with record low temperatures and negative wind chills.   We landed in Hong Kong on December 26th to be greeted with temperatures in the 60's. ^^

The first night we got in really late so we just went to bed.  We stayed at Hong Kong Hostel in Causeway Bay for the first 2 nights and got our own room.  Hostels in HK aren't the best, but it was good for what it was.  Our first full day in Hong Kong, we walked from Causeway Bay to Central.  We stopped to eat lunch at a pretty seedy looking "cooked food" market, but we got rice and noodle dishes for around $3 each.  After that, we took the Peak tram up to the top of the Peak and saw some sick views of HK and Victoria Harbor.  We wandered to East Tsim Sha Tsui to the Avenue of the Stars and saw the Symphony of Lights show on the harbor.

walking from Causeway Bay to Central

amazing buildings in HK

amazing view from the Peak

Salisbury Road in HK

Victoria Harbor

On Tuesday, we got up and headed to the Ferry Terminal to take the ferry over to Macau.  You don't need a visa to get into Hong Kong or Macau, but you still have to go through immigration with your passport each time you depart and enter either one (which kind of threw us for a loop when we had to go out through customs and back through immigration in Shanghai).  The ferry only takes about an hour to get to Macau, and when we arrived and got through immigration, we went outside to find our hotel bus.

Macau isn't very big so most people get around by taxis and buses, and pretty much every hotel it seems has a free shuttle bus from the ferry terminal.  Our shuttle bus, however did not have a clearly labeled parking spot so we stood outside waiting for it for about an hour before we decided to just take a cab.  After all this, I half expected our hotel to be shady, but the Emperor Hotel was actually really nice!  (minus the weird window from the shower to the room with a flowing purple curtain to block the view)  We went out exploring, ate dinner at the Grand Lisboa Casino, and walked up to the Portuguese quarter and saw the ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral.  Macau is basically a casino attraction, but the streets with Portuguese buildings actually made it feel really authentic.

Macau egg tarts mmm

on the Portuguese streets in Macau

view of the Lisboa from the lighthouse

some of the many casinos

The next day we walked around for an hour trying to find the cable car up to the Guia Lighthouse with no luck even though we could see the lighthouse from the ground.  We finally got a cab driver to take us there, and it was definitely not possible to walk.  We went to the Venetian Casino for lunch, which is like the same as the one in Las Vegas.  It's enormous and even has the gondola rides.  There's an entire shopping mall and gigantic food court there.  We got our first Portuguese egg tarts there which were the most delicious thing ever.  That night we had dinner at the buffet restaurant at the Sands Casino and visited the Playboy bar, where Playboys from all over were working.

We took the ferry back to Hong Kong on Thursday and explored the Mong Kok area.  There are tons of markets here including the famous Ladies' Market.  On Friday, we went to Ocean Park!  It's basically just an amusement park in Hong Kong right on the South China Sea.  The rides weren't that great, but there were giant pandas and a dolphin show, and the weather that day was actually kind of hot.  That night was New Years Eve so we got dressed up and wandered out to the Times Square area near our hostel in Causeway Bay.  Unfortunately, we got to Times Square a little too late to see the stage and a little too early to really want to stand waiting for 2 hours until midnight.  We figured we could make it to the bar area Lan Kwai Fook by midnight so we left Times Square.  When we arrived at LKF, there was a huge sign that said "45 minute wait" to get into LKF.  Apparently police were regulating the crowds and letting only groups of people in at a time.  We were IN LINE at 12!  Totally ridiculous.

On our last full day in HK, we decided to go eat the famous dim sum at City Hall.  The wait was an hour long but well worth it.  The restaurant was in a huge dining room with floor to ceiling windows looking over the city.  After eating, we got on a bus to head to Repulse Bay which is supposed to be a really beautiful beach..except we didn't know exactly where to get off the bus so we ended up riding it to Stanley.  Stanley ended up having a beach as well as a little town with waterfront shops so we wandered around there for the rest of the day.  We got to see a beautiful sunset from Stanley on our last night in Hong Kong.  The next day we pretty much traveled all day via Hong Kong --> Shanghai --> Incheon and finally arrived back in Seoul to see SNOW on the ground.  Ugh, back to the frozen tundra that is Seoul

Ladies' Market

Ocean Park

NYE '11 in Times Square HK

Stanley Beach