Well, a summary of today would definitely be interesting…or frustrating. In the morning we ate breakfast and boarded the tour bus that a travel agent booked for us. It was described as a “City Tour” that visited several shopping markets, the floating market/Aberdeen, and Victoria Peak in addition to some of the sites that we would see along the way. It was supposed to be a 4 hour tour…So I know you’re thinking that it sounds like a great tour why are you foreshadowing a “but”. Well, we start our tour. Naturally there are several spoiled little kids, who were old enough to know better. There were several Filipinos, which makes sense because the travel agent that we used was from the Philippines. The guide spoke English; however, his grammar was very poor and his jokes were below par. Our first stop was the “Avenue of Stars”. It is basically a little road with handprints in the cement, just like in Hollywood. This road was right next to the harbor, so that was a nice view of the huge skyscrapers. Since we are in Hong Kong, we didn’t recognize many names. It was limited to Jet Li and Jackie Chan. Our next stop was an hour long and it was at a jewelers. Let me just say, after listening to screaming kids on the bus, I was not happy to hear that ¼ of our tour was going to be spent looking at jewelry, described as using blood diamonds (if you don’t know what that is go watch the Leo DiCaprio movie, Blood Diamond, which I highly recommend as a movie anyway). Our next stop was a 30 minute stop at a “snack store” in a very sketch building. (We had to go through the delivery doors, go up 5 floors and down a hallway with dim lighting and only one door. It was sketch!)
Next stop was the floating market…aka “floating restaurant” which was about 100 yards away from the pier. It was supposed to be a 20 min boat ride (which was optional because it was $50 HKD/person to ride the boat/sampan. The Eriksons went, but the rest of us did not participate considering having to pay for anything after paying for a tour is ridiculous! The last stop was at Victoria’s Peak overlooking the city. That sentence pretty much sums up that experience. So after all of the frustration of a very poor tour…it got even better.
So, we found out that we had to drop the rambunctious kids off at some water park and another family at Disneyland. We were going to be dropped at some market in the middle of the city…here’s the catcher…they weren’t going to bring us back to the hotel! We had to find a ride back! Basically, we through a huge fit in front of several people and had the tour guide and driver bring us back to the hotel instead of dropping us off and removing the “mandatory tipping” that we were supposed to pay. We tried to give a tip to the driver when we arrived at the hotel, but he was so mad that he didn’t even accept it. The whole morning was pretty much a terrible way to spend touring Hong Kong. So…before I describe the rest of our day, let me give you a piece of advice if you ever plan to travel to Hong Kong. DO NOT USE WIN’S TRAVEL AGENCY LTD! They will screw you over. I blame that company and not our travel agent, because 1) the guide was incredibly unprofessional and tried to place all of the blame on the travel agency instead of trying to help 2) our tour last year, using the same travel agent, in Bangkok was fantastic! 3) The whole itinerary of the tour was a simple ploy to get you to spend money where they wanted you to spend it.
Anyway, even though our morning was pretty awful, we did have a good rest of the day. We decided to be a little more adventurous by trying to find the so-called “good shopping”. We managed to get directions to the subway, which was really not complicated to use. We traveled to Mong Kok market. It was huge. Tons of vendors. The prices were decent. You could tell that the vendors knew what other vendors were selling. I really wanted to get a nice mahjong set, but there were only a few places to get a nice one and they were asking $40 USD for it and would not lower the price. I should have got it anyway, but oh well. I can live without it. The rest of the family got a lot of nice things for fairly cheap prices. This was the place to go for the “good shopping”. However, I didn’t find as many clothes, shoes, or purses like I did in Bangkok which was a little surprising.
After shopping, we ate at another restaurant with pretty good food. We then caught the train back to our hotel and most of us just passed out. Overall, I’m very surprised at Hong Kong. It was definitely not the place that I thought it would be. The people are unlike any other Asian people I’ve ever met. They are actually really rude. Finding suits is not as easy as everyone said it would be which is kinda sad because all of the guys were planning on buying suits. Right now, the smog is really getting to me. Johnson City has such fresh air that even Nashville sometimes makes me congested. Here it’s worse. So, if you haven’t gathered from my blog post, it’s nice to say that I visited Hong Kong, but I will probably never come back. Goodnight all. Blog tomorrow!
Tip # 9: When booking a tour, make sure you know what you are getting so there are no surprises. It might even be better to venture out without a tour guide.
Tip # 10: If you know in advance that everything, including the language people speak, is in Cantonese, make sure to bring a dictionary. Even though Hong Kong is one of the business capitals of the world, nobody we met spoke good enough English to understand that we were lost.
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