Day in Hong Kong

Well, we made it to Hong Kong. I can’t say that sitting in a plane for 12 hrs. is on my list of favorite things to do, but I guess I didn’t have a choice.  Our trip started off a little bumpy due to some confusion in Grand Forks. Delta’s computer’s thought that we were taking a baby TO Hong Kong, not just from Hong Kong. This little detail caused us to have to wait an hour at the ticket counter while waiting for someone at “headquarters” to cancel the extra passenger in the computer. Not exactly the way we wanted to start out the trip. Thankfully we arrived early and it wasn’t a problem in the end. We’ve never been so glad to see our boarding passes. One of my friends called it labor pains. After that snafu, everything went smoothly. We arrived in Hong Kong at 10pm Sept. 3. A CCAI rep. met us at the airport and took us to our hotel. The Hong Kong airport is on a island, so we went by taxi to the Regal Kowloon hotel and basically crashed.


Sat. morning we were up early because we couldn’t sleep. There is a complimentary breakfast buffet that we went to. It has Western and Chinese foods. One of the more unusual things we saw was a type of melon that was white and looked like it had poppy seeds in it. It tasted kind of sweet, but was mushy. At 8:30am we meet our CCAI rep. and most of the other families in the lobby for a tour. 2 of the families brought their adopted Chinese children with them. Another family also has Chinese children. There is a fairly large ranged in age. For some families this will be their 1st child and others have 1 or more children. For some reason I thought that most of the families would be younger than us, but everyone is at least as old as we are if not older. I guess that makes sense since you have to be 30 y.o. to adopt from China and it’s been 5 yrs. Since we started that process. There are 10 families in our group. We have not met one of the families because they missed their flight in the US. All of us except for one family will be going to Nanchang on Sunday to get our children.

We spent 5 hrs. touring the area. Our CCAI rep. was a good tour guide, telling us about the area and points of interest. We went to Victoria Peak to see an over look of the cities, a jewelry factory and showroom (Mikayla, they had all kinds of different gems. You would have loved it!), Stanley market (a bunch of clothing and souveniour shops near the ocean) and toured a harbor on a sampan (small boat). For lunch, we ate at a traditional Chinese restaurant near our hotel. (mom, we had sweet and sour pork, chicken with bean sprouts, fried noodles, fried rice, 3 different kinds of dim sum (dumplings), broccoli and watermelon).

After lunch, we had the afternoon to ourselves. We decided to walk to the Hong Kong history museum. It was quite interesting and we spent 3 hrs. there. I was even able to find a souveniour spoon at the gift shop.

In the evening we walked along the water way and watched a light show. The city is pretty at night with all the building lit up, but pictures don’t do it justice. We came back to the hotel for supper.

Hong Kong is very Westernized. It was a British colony until 1997. The Chinese people who live here experience freedoms that mainland Chinese don’t have. For example, they can stage a protest against the gov’t and not get in trouble and the 1 child policy does not apply to them. Their currency (Hong Kong dollar) is also different from the mainland. The people here speak the Cantonese dialect of Chinese. Incidentally, there are 100 different Chinese dialects that all use the same written language, but are spoken differently. So all the Chinese can read the written language, but they can’t all understand the spoken words. Most of the people we have encountered speak at least some English. There are lots of people here touring and tour buses are everywhere. The traffic is much more controlled than in Beijing and the drivers actually follow the rules of the road. We can’t drink the tap water here, so everything is in bottles. We are able to get cold drinks though. In Beijing, it was always warm. There is a Starbucks right across the street from our hotel.

The weather in Hong Kong isn’t nearly as warm as I thought it would be. Our guide said that a cyclone just passed by and that cooled down the temperature. It is humid and was foggy this morning, but it was never uncomfortable.

Sunday morning we will all meet in the lobby at 8:30am to go to the airport and fly to Nanchang. We will meet Megan sometime in the afternoon. We haven’t heard a time yet. So our next post will have pictures of Megan!