October 15, 2006 – Bye Manila... Hello HK!

We woke up pretty late today.. I think the latest that I’ve awaken on this trip so far. 10:30am to be exact. We showered, packed, and went downstairs for breakfast. We ate some more… UCC coffee (taste like Timmy Ho’s coffee), palabok, Country chicken (Lisa’s favourite chicken), Lisa’s uncle cooked some spicy squid dish (yummy), pork skewers, pork tocino, mangosteen, etc. So much food man. This is getting freaking ridiculous!!!!!

We said our goodbyes to Lisa’s uncle, aunt, and Cheryl. It was sad leaving their place. Thank you Uncle Agustin, Aunty Constancia, and Cheryl for being the best hosts! You really made our vacation a real pleasure. You spent a lot of time with us, and treated us with the greatest thought, and sincerity.

I’m in the airport right now. We just checked in, and saw this dude with the hugest mole and this frickin long, loooooooong hair growing out of it. It was disgusting. We were all saying “moley, moley, moley” just like in Austin Powers. Then he walked right by us and gave us a close-up. Awful! So we’re in the terminal right now awaiting for our flight to Hong Kong. Thank you Manila for showing us a great time… you were definitely a lot better than the people back home explained it. You were hospitable, friendly, relatively clean (where we were at least), and you served excellent food. I’ll definitely be back here, and will be able to squash any stereotypes about you when I get back home. Mabuhay!

Hong Kong

We’ve been kind of dreading HK. I think the perspective of staying in HK for 7 nights/8 days is a little daunting. Daunting because we think we’re going to get bored, and well, we haven’t really stayed at one destination for too long so far. We’ll see how it goes. I have to meet 2 sets of relatives, and it’s going to be neat seeing all our friends in one place. I can’t wait to see Dom.

So we got in to the airport after a freaking 1 hour delay. I am beginning to really hate airports, and the lines. Immigration, check-in, security lines, filling out arrival cards, departure cards. It’s just a real pain in the ass. Anyhow, we’ll be in HK for a week, so we won’t have to do any of that for awhile at least.

We got into the city at around 8 in the evening. We took a van that Terry was able to book for us for $200 HKD to our hotel. Really good considering it would normally cost a lot more. We got to our hotel, checked in, and went straight up to our room. Anthony purchased some SIM cards for our cell phones, so we’re all connected in HK now. After that, Becky & Darren walked to our hotel from their place (which is about 4 blocks away at Yau Ma Tei. We’re located at Jordan, on Nathan road, which is fairly busy, and only 1 station away from Mong Kok. We were bored and hungry, so we went downstairs and headed out into the city to do a little exploring. We ended up going to McDonalds (yes, our first food destination in HK was McDonalds), however, we did go there for a reason. This was because McDonalds in HK serves chicken wings (very good, and cheap!) and also a rice burger. The rice burger basically consists of a patty made out of rice. Yeah, that’s right, only in HK. It wasn’t that bad though. Not great, but not bad.

After our late dinner, we went back to our room and waited for Terry, Tammy, Yuri, and Ron. It’s kind of weird because all of us are in HK together, but it really is kind of neat. It feels like home because all your friends are here… but yet you’re half way across the globe. When they arrived, we went out for a late night snack at a local Chinese restaurant. Unfortunately, it was rather disappointing, because the food was only mediocre. With that said, it wasn’t anything special because there weren’t many restaurants open around this time anyhow. We finished our meal at around midnight and then walked back to our hotel.

Our hotel room is fairly nice. Ron, Anthony, Lisa, and I, are sharing a hotel room here. Lisa and I are sleeping on the sofa bed in the ‘living room’ (small!), while Ron and Anthony are sleeping in 2 separate single beds in the other bedroom. It’s quite comfortable, and it’s a real plus being able to split the cost of the hotel amongst the 4 of us. We decided to collectively sign up for Internet access here. It sucks big time. So freaking slow… I think I’m going to complain and cancel it. Anyhow, for that reason, I won’t be posting many photos up. I’ll post them up once I get a better Internet connection.

I’m going to call it a night. See you tomorrow!