Day 9- January 9th

Today was the first full day in Hong Kong so we were all excited excited to explore what it had to offer. We began our day with a good breakfast of noodles, eggs, bread, and cereal and with money in hand and our Octopus Cards loaded, we left the hotel around 9:30. We met up with a good friend (Rick) of Kent and Cheryl who has been working in Hong Kong for several years as a pastor for a faith based hospital. It was great to experience the sights and sounds of Hong Kong for the first time as it was very different from China. I am sure everyone would agree that Hong Kong is much more westernized than China and is a very affluent country. It seemed like every car we saw was either a BMW, Mercedes, or some other nice foreign car. A couple people on the trip tried to count how many Teslas we saw and there were almost too many to count. One car we saw was a matte black BMW, pictured below….

The journey to Rick’s apartment took quite a while because it was on Hong Kong island which is quite far away from where we are staying. Although the public transportation in Hong Kong is really good, it can take quite a while and often requires multiple modes of transportation to get to where you want to go. For example, to get to Rick’s apartment it took at least two hours and we used two different buses, and had multiple subway line transfers.

Even though we had eaten breakfast when we left the hotel, we were all ready for some food after our long voyage up the mountain to the apartment. Fortunately for us, Rick and his wife were very gracious and they had prepared a taco salad for all of us!

After this delicious lunch and spectacular views from this seventh floor apartment, we hopped on another bus to go to Dragon’s Back trail for a hike. On the way there, we saw more amazing cars including a McLaren and Rolls Royce in dealerships, and multiple Porsches cruising down the streets.  

Dragon’s Back was a about a two mile hike to the top where we then walked along the trail to take in some more spectacular views.

At this point we split, the group split up and 9 of us walked down the other side of the mountain to the other trail head for Dragon’s Back. At this point, it was about 5:00 and we were all ready to get dinner. On the way to dinner, we realized that we needed more money on our Octopus Cards so we split up to do this. After refilling our cards we got onto the subway to get a transfer to another station but when we were on the train, Adam realized that we had left Ryan back at the station because he was still withdrawing cash at the station. We immediately felt really bad for leaving him behind and decided that the best hope of reuniting with him would be to get off at the main station we planned to get off at before. Luckily, Ryan kept a cool head and figured that we would get off at the main stop and we were reunited with him when the next train came.

Next on our agenda was food so several of us left the group to go to Mr. Wong’s, a local eatery highly recommended by foreign exchange students at the local university. The other half of the group left to go see sites of the city.

Below is a picture of us at Mr. Wongs. The best part about this restaurant was it was less than $10 USD for unlimited food and drink! Needless to say, we were really full after we ate.

After a day full of activities, we were all ready to head back to the hotel to recharge for the adventures of the next day.