This weekend was the last weekend of break, and I wanted to get a little more exploring in before my classes started.
Saturday I woke up late, and then eventually headed to a giant mall called MegaBox. It is basically the equivalent of Mall of America in Hong Kong, and I think may actually be the largest mall in Asia. It has an IMAX theater an ice skating rink, and a lot of stores and restaurants including Ikea.
Our intention for going there was to see the Green Hornet in Imax 3D. I enjoyed the movie, although I don’t think that it was absolutely necessary to see it in Imax 3D, but oh well. The movie was a good mix of action and humor. After the movie we got something to eat. I tried a Mos Burger, which was very good. It is basically a burger with some chili on it, and a giant slice of tomato. The restaurant is a chain restaurant kind of similar to culvers, in price and atmosphere.
As good as this burger was though, I would rather that instead of Mos burgers there would be Taco/Burrito places. That seems to be very lacking here. I don’t need to eat Chinese/other Asian food for every meal, and most options are limited to that and burgers with the occasional pasta or pizza place. It is one of my goals to find some more restaurants to vary my food intake.
On Sunday, myself and a few other people took the train to Shenzhen, which is directly across the border into mainland China. The total trip cost less than 10 USD round trip.
One thing that I really like about living here is the reach of the public transit system especially the MTR (subway). I think it was very cool that I could take public transport to a different country (not really a separate country, but pretty much). With the MTR plus mini-busses you can get anywhere you want in all of Hong Kong, and for a lot cheaper than in the US. The MTR is fairly well used and I think that the majority of people use it to get to work.
On a related note, something that I have noticed is the overwhelming amount of luxury vehicles compared to the number of non-luxury vehicles. On the road you will pretty much only see taxis, buses, industrial vehicles, and luxury vehicles. No one is driving around in the equivalent of a 1995 Ford Taurus. Instead they are all in BMW’s and Porsches. I think this is for two reasons. 1) the MTR is good enough you don’t need a car 2) It turns out that in Hong Kong they have a 100% tax on buying a car, so I think you only buy a car if you are very wealthy and then you buy a nice car.
Back to my trip. The MTR stops at the immigration point between Hong Kong and China. You first depart Hong Kong, then you walk on a bridge across the “moat” that creates the boundary at the border. This was my first time walking across a national border, so that was cool. Then you enter China immigration. Some of the people in our group did not have visas, but because they were non-american citizens they were allowed to get special 5 day visas to visit only Shenzhen. The US and many countries are in a fight over border restrictions. The US has strict rules for other countries so those countries do the same towards only US citizens.
After immigration we headed out of the train station to a giant shopping center. This center (Lo Wu) is designed similar to the Silk Market in Beijing. It is a collection of individual vendors within a large building. This gave me some practice with my bargaining. For the day I got some Vibram 5 Fingers (stolen or fake but they fit my feet and as long as they don’t fall apart they will be good), a green laser pointer, a screen protector for my iPod, and what I thought was a 128 GB flash drive. When I bought the flash drive I had the merchant plug it in to show me the capacity and it showed 124 GB. I figured that this drive would be unstable but for the price (50 Yuan) it would be worth it to put things like my downloaded movies that I don’t care if I lose on. It turns out however that when I got home the real capacity is only .7 GB. The capacity showed up as 124 GB on my computer but only .7 fit on it, I didn’t realize it was possible to trick a computer about the size of a drive like that.
The next morning was the first day of class but more importantly it was SUPER BOWL MONDAY Packers vs. Steelers. Kick off was at 7:30 am local time, and some Green Bay fans and I headed toward an Irish Pub in Tsim Sha Tsui. Besides showing the game, the pub also had an all you can eat breakfast buffet. It was a little expensive (200 HKD) but it was worth it. The only bad thing was that it was the Asian Sports Network feed, which meant no commercials, and bad announcers. Another exciting thing was that former Wimbledon champion Martina Navratilova was there, which was odd. A Czech tennis player, in an Irish bar in Hong Kong. The game was excellent, but a little nerve racking in the end, but the Packers emerged victorious. As soon as the game was done though, I had to leave to go to class.
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