I Love Hong Kong

While staying over here I am on a tourist visa, which means I have to leave the country every 90 days.  So, last week my teammate, Andrew, and I flew down to Hong Kong to stamp our visas and have a little R&R in the city. Here is a picture dump and quick summery of everything that I experienced while there.

Everyone that works with me has to do these visa runs every three months.  Some have been to Hong Kong literally dozens of times.  So, I asked them what their favorite part about the city was...and without fail everyone said, "THE FOOD."  You see Hong Kong is very much what they say, "The Perfect blend of East meeting West."  There are tons of great Western restaurants among the 53 different nationalities of cuisine.  Well the one place I heard about over and over again was a Mongolian BBQ restaurant named "Nomads."

 

This place completely lived up to it's reputation.  We ate there twice during the week.  I should probably have created a separate post about this restaurant, but for the sake of length of post I will move on.

Here is my "create your own pizza" steak, bacon, and pineapple.  Oh man was it good...both times.  (Thomas we might have to fly to Hong Kong together one day to go here).

Hong Kong has an awesome skyline including this building.  You might recognize it from Batman's A Dark Knight movie.

One of the ferries that we loved riding back and forth from the mainland to Hong Kong Island where we stayed.

 The first day we arrived we ate at California Pizzeria, then headed up to The Peak on this really cool tram to eat at Bubba Gump's and see the city from up top.  It was really foggy that night so we couldn't see much, but it was still really cool and the restaurant was delicious.  I didn't realize how much I actually missed Western food.

 The best part about the trip was definitely getting to spend time with our great friends Marilyn and Christina that we met a few months earlier.  They live over a 1,000 miles away from us so it was nice getting to meet up.  Here they are posing with our Hostel sign upon arrival.  We decided to go cheap on a place to stay so we could do some other fun stuff.  The hostel ended up working out really well.

 Fun stuff like going to Disneyland!  Three out of the four of us had never been in the states before and were really excited about our first time being in Hong Kong.  This is a picture of the subway that ran straight out to the park.  It was all Disney themed with characters inside and Mickey Mouse shaped windows.

Mickey at the entrance made out of flowers and pumpkins.

The Disney band getting down to all kinds of great classics.  I could have probably watched them all day if there wasn't so much else to do.

Andrew and I taking a quick picture in Dumbo.  Andrew summarized the day as "magical."

The day concluded with a Halloween themed parade...

and fireworks over Sleeping Beauty's Castle to more Classic Disney songs.

We also rode the World's longest escalator which is a half mile in length.

The rest of our time we spent either shopping in the markets or island hopping.  The islands were definitely my favorite part. Here is a picture of the crew on Lamma Island

 and here are the girls on top of a rock at Cheung Chau island

A little spelunking on Cheung Chau (both of the islands had cool caves)

This was taken just after doing some cliff jumps into the ocean

Taken at the summit of one of the hills we climbed.  We had a pretty sweet 360 view of the island from up here.  We just had to ignore a lot of danger signs to get there.  This is my attempt at what the girls call a "smolder."  It is a work in progress.

It was an awesome week to help get regrouped and refocused to finish my home stretch strong over here.  I can't believe I'm already over half way finished.

P.S. Sorry this ended up being an epically long post...