This blog hasn't been a daily occurrence, as you may have noticed, but sitting here in the deathly silence of this dorm I thought I'd write some more about Hong Kong, especially as Amy and Dave are thinking of going there for a holiday at Easter and wanted to know if I liked it.
That's a hard question to answer, and I don't know if I can answer it fairly. Much to my annoyance, I never made it out of the city, I really wish I had! If I go back next year, which is quite possible, I'd like to explore the rest of Hong Kong. There's lots of hikes you can do, probably not quite the same as hiking through the Nepalese Himalayas but still enjoyable I think; and there are outlying islands with little villages; and there's a cool-looking geopark too, so I think you could easily spend time in Hong Kong and not be in the city all the time.
It's super-easy to get around and everyone speaks English, every sign is in English, and the bus tells you the next stop in English so you can't possibly get lost. There's a coffee place on every corner (did I eat dim sum, even once? No, but I did eat croissants every morning!) and food ranging from fairly cheap to crazily expensive. If you want to shop, for clothes, books, electronics etc, you can do so until all your money has evaporated, and there's everything from cheap markets to Gucci and Prada with everything in between. They even have Skinfood and Faceshop, in case you're feeling nostalgic for Jeju.
But for me, after two weeks I was quite glad to be leaving. Big cities are not really my thing, and the relentless consumerism and long metro journeys became quite wearing after a while. Georgina, the host family Mum, said that it's quite a high-pressure environment, there's lots of pressure to 'succeed' so appearance is very important, good clothes, hair, make-up and so on. There are adverts everywhere so you're constantly being bombarded with products that will make you thinner/ prettier/ better and poorer (but they don't tell you that!). Take an MP3! Hong Kongers are, however, extremely friendly and helpful and you will not be stared at as though you had two heads which, if you've just come from Bangladesh, will be very refreshing!
It isn't cheap. Coffee is about $5 for a large latte, a cheap owl of noodles (what a cute typo!) is about $3.5, the cheapest guesthouse rooms I saw were about $15-20 per night, and we won't talk about the shiny black toys. So, if I was Amy and Dave looking for an Easter respite from Dhaka, I'd think Hong Kong wouldn't be a bad place to go for a total change of scene.
