Christmas Travels Pt 1

OK. I’ve been really busy – but I’m going to inform you of my Christmas travels now. It’s a fairly long adventure – so I might break it down into a few chapters!
First – Hong Kong!
We were dead excited on the Friday night – we all met up on the Friday night, ready to catch the night bus down. Following a quite-expected uncomfortable night of little sleep (that night bus is going to be the death of me), we arrived in Tokyo, grabbed some breakfast at a Maka Donaraadousu, (the Japanese don’t understand it if you simply say ‘McDonalds’), and then spent a bit of time around Shibuya – being stupid and buying a lot of CDs. There is a place in Shibuya called Tower Records – it has about 6 or 7 floors of music. It is probably the biggest music shop I have ever seen and it stocks so much music! Unfortunately everytime I go there I seem to spend quite a bit :-S – soon I’ll run out of CDs I really want to buy….or not!

Christmas outside Shibuya Station.

On the first floor of the Starbucks in Shibuya, you can see Kathryn, whilst on the second in the corner, you can see Siobhan, David, and Brigid (who came down to Tokyo with us to meet her boyfriend).

Still in Japan...that's a mighty lot of Japanese! Luckily it did switch over to English every now and then....if only we considered beforehand that Chinese would be another difficult bag of tricks to decipher!

The flight was 5 hours from Tokyo to Hong Kong – I didn’t expect it to be as far away. Oh how I love flying!
Arriving in Hong Kong was great – lots of people spoke English! Arriving at our Hostel was a bit of a scary experience. We had to pass through this dodgy looking market entrance – security guards were making sure those who passed, were those who were going to the hostel. They didn’t really make us feel any safer, as the people who were going through looked rather shady and interesting characters!

It turned out that our hostel was not a building on its own – it was part of a large block of flats. The whole building was generally a shabby one, the corridors were dull and dingy and we were getting really worried about where we were going to be staying. On the 10th floor we found the reception to our hostel and were then shown to our room – we passed through a big nicely-painted yellow door that really stood out from the rest of the corridor décor and once through the threshold, were in a nicer looking corridor with tiled floor and clean decoration. Our room was less than luxury but fine for what we needed.

This was the central space inside the building which our hostel was part of...not really to the same standards of a Hilton Hotel...!

Just down the road from our hostel there was an Irish pub which served TETLEY’S and proper English style food! It was so delicious, whilst we felt a little bit ashamed for not taking full advantage of the potentially excellent Chinese food on offer, we really appreciated the opportunity to have some ‘proper’ western style food and not the ‘imitation’ Western food that Japan seems to produce!

We enjoy some slightly more familiar food and drink.

We went to a beautiful fancy floating restaurant, which looked nice enough but we experienced a little bit of culture-culture shock! Having been used to Japanese politeness so much, the Chinese were often a little bit forthcoming and impatient! They would linger around you. The food was delicious though!

The floating restaurant - with a very clichéd Chinese restaurant name - 'Jumbo' - I think it's a bit more up-market than the Jumbo buffet we have in Huddersfield!

On the boat (or in the restaurant!)

Hong Kong was a beautiful place to be in. Amazing buildings and beautiful views. On Christmas Eve we went up to Victoria Peak to admire the view (luckily the sky wasn’t hazy). We went to a swanky bar by the view and toasted in Christmas day. The day before the eve of Christmas, we found an Anglican Cathedral in and amongst the massive buildings. They were having a festival of Carols and Lessons which we decided to attend. It was really nice to attend something really Christmassy and Christian. I loved the opportunity to sing along with a big congregation to all the carols and I guess it made me a little bit homesick and nostalgic. The service was great – they had a fantastic choir and the place was packed!

Toasting Christmas Day outside at a very nice bar on Victoria Peak.

Admiring the view!

On Christmas day I woke the party of three (Siobhan, Kathryn and David - four including me) to the sound of ‘Handel’s – Alleluia chorus’ on my iPod speakers! Christmas day was the day we were going to get from Hong Kong to Thailand via Shenzhen in China. It all went very smoothly! We decided earlier that, in an effort to make Christmas Day a little bit special, we would all wear a silly hat. I had a Santa Hat, Siobhan and David had Silver hats, and Kathryn had a silver feathery headband. So we took the train to the Chinese boarded and crossed through customs and passport controls wearing our beautiful head gear – we only hope that we made the passport control officers days a little bit special! They never look very happy do they!

We're in China! With Special hats! Once again being some of very few white people in the area, it didn't really help us trying to blend in - probably shouting out 'MERRY CHRISTMAS' to Chinese passers-by didn't help either!

We had a very nice Chinese meal for our Christmas dinner at Shenzhen International Airport - with some ridiculous translated meal names (like 'The Porks Intenstines dancing on the cherry blossom" or "The Chicken cooked on the admiration of a willow tree" - just bizarre). We continued to wear our special hats (we actually made it very successfully to the airport, once in China – no easy feat when fewer people than in Japan speak English).

A nice looking Chinese restaurant in Shenzhen airport. I reflect that we had a lot of 'dinner' photos - but if anything it should only reinforce to you all that we're eating very well!

Then, we were on our plane to Bangkok, a three hour flight – still wearing our special hats!