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Its supposedly one of those unique cities in the world, up there with New York and Paris. Why? Cos its so darned busy and crowded. But yes, it does have something special - watches - lots of cheap watches!!
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Busy busy Hong Kong

K.thambi
2006-01-05 23:13:58

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Its supposedly one of those unique cities in the world, up there with New York and Paris. Why? Cos its so darned busy and crowded. But yes, it does have something special - watches - lots of cheap watches!!

The day started out fantastically with a FREE BUSINESS CLASS flight from Shanghai to Hong Kong. How did we get this free, and why was it business class. Well, let me teach you a lesson in not letting anything go to waste. You see, in 2003 when Melenie and I flew to London, we went on Japan Airlines. And we had the clever idea of joining the Japan Airlines frequent flyer programme (it was free) simply because we had nothing else to do on the plane and the form was sitting in front of us.

Two years later, we discovered that we had earned enough points on the flight to give us 2 free business class flights from Shanghai to Hong Kong. Yay!!! It was such a good flight - so much space, so much food, we didn't want the flight to end. You can tell that both of us have NEVER flown business class ever!

We arrived in Hong Kong and promptly caught
the airtrain into Kowloon - the central tourist district. Kowloon is a busy place, with lots of people, most of them white tourists. And also lots of tall buildings and many many streets. Its quite confronting just being plonked in the middle of this busy place. You kind of don't know where to start.

We only had 4 hours to spend in Hong Kong so we had to make our visit a quick but useful one. And what better way to spend your time than to eat. So we proceeded to try and find a nice cheap place to stuff our face with and were shocked to discover that - oh no - prices were expensive, like back home. It was then that we realised after 1 month of eating cheap in India and China that the rest of the world did indeed pay $5 for a plate of noodles. How were we ever going to cope. It felt like so much money just handing over that large some - like I was spending my life savings.

We soon discovered that everything was blooming expensive in Kowloon - expensive by the incredibly cheap standards that we had come to expect from
our travels. So like penniless scrooges we wandered the streets scowling at the shops, thinking why they couldn't be more like their mother country China.

Thats when we discovered the cheap shops. Turns out we had just been wandering down the wrong streets. All of a sudden, the sense of sadness vanished and we were back in action. Out came the credit card, and whoosh, we found ourselves gleefully buying things all the time forgetting that our suitcases were now so incredibly overweight that we'd have to carry all this stuff has hand luggage.

At that was Hong Kong. Just one big shop waiting to rob you of all your money.