Welcome to Hong Kong

Welcome to Hong Kong
Originally uploaded by jrherron.

It's taken me a few days to get my legs back underneath me, but I'm finally ready to sit down and tell you about my whirlwind visit to Hong Kong. My vacation Didn't really get started until after I phoned in to a meeting, So from we had to be at the airport early so I could clear security and find myself a nice quiet place to sit and take notes about the meeting. We didn't make the first flight, but knew the second one was nice and empty. After my meeting finished I got introduced to my travel group for the week, and ff we went. We Got Quality business class seats and I got to catch up on my early summer blockbuster movies. I saw spider man 3, Fantastic 4 and something else that wasn't even good enough for me to remember only a week later. As you can see from the picture the skies over Hong Kong were clearer than usual for our arrival, and as I looked down I realized I was unlikely to cover more than a tiny fraction of this enormous city in the 3 full days we had to get around. We jumped off the plane and found a couple of taxis over to our hotel, The Metro Park Kowloon. We checked into our small but comfortable room, changed clotes and Went out on our First Hong Kong adventure. Our Tour Guides Kin and Annie led us to this crowded but authentic Seafood restauarant that even If I lived there I wouldn't have found for years. It was in the Aberdeen Neighborhood, and Our group was clearly the only non-natives there. We also met up with Todd's girlfriend Kinus, and got to hang out with her a good portion of the weekend. It took me a while to get past the fact that you had to sanitize all your dishes and utensils in a bowl that you fill with hot tea, but once I got past that the food was delicious. I ate my first ever Mantis shrimp (I'll spare you the name it is commonly called) and ate lots of clams and shrimp and crab. We took a bus and a rather long walk back to the hotel, and made my first use of an Octopus card. You can literally use it almost everywhere. Every train, bus and ferry, and many grocery and convenience stores. Speaking of Convenience stores in HK you're never ever very far a way from a 7-11 or a circle K. At that point it was time to crash, It would soon be Our first big day.