Hong Kong: Day 1 and 2

Hong Kong is one of my favorite cities! We got there Wednesday evening and after settling into our hotel, we took cabs to the Peak! From reading online, we were told that we would take a tram up to a look out point from where the whole city would be visible and the view would be fantastic. So, we got on a tram which we paid for with our octopus cards (multipurpose cards that can be used to pay for metro rides, tram rides, in convenience stores etc. ). The tram took us up the tracks which were at a very high incline and we got glimpses of the view we would be seeing from up top - it looked promising.

The Tram

Alex and Vince on the tram

When we reached the top we were surprised to see that where we got off was actually a huge multi-story mall!

Entering the Mall

We split up to get some dinner. In Shanghai, everyone speaks Mandarin. However, in Hong Kong, everyone speaks Cantonese and almost everyone speaks English. It is much easier to get around and ask for directions in Hong Kong. The hotel staff were all fluent in English unlike the hotel staff in a hotel in Shanghai or Beijing. Also, while walking down a street in Hong Kong, you are more likely to come across immigrants from countries like India that have now settled down here. Immigrants in Shanghai or Beijing are almost non existent. Apart from the language, the food in Hong Kong is also different. They eat Cantonese food which is lighter and the food has less seasoning and spices. I got my first taste of Cantonese food at dinner that night. I ate some noodles with beef. It was delicious!

My dinner

After dinner, we headed towards the top most floor from which we would be able to see the peak and the breathtaking view. When we got in line to pay to get up there, the woman selling tickets told us that it was very very foggy outside and there would no point trying to go up there that night. We peeked outside and saw for ourselves that you couldn't see more than a foot ahead of you. We were pretty disappointed and headed back out and got into cabs.

The cab ride was an interesting one both in terms of the driving and the conversation. We had to go downhill and visibility was almost zero. That didn't stop the cab driver from driving quite fast nor did it stop him from making interesting and entertaining conversation. I was manly the target of the conversation much to the amusement of the rest of my friends in the backseat. I was glad when the ride was over and we got off at a really cool area called Lan Kwai Fong which is famous for it's nightlife. It was a sloped street that looked like it could belong in San Francisco, but instead of adorable houses, it had loads and loads of bars mostly sports bars. There was a FIFA World Cup game between Switzerland and Spain, so we found a bar that would seat our big group and went in. Luckily and to our surprise, that bar in Hong Kong had people from Switzerland cheering on their team. It was fun watching them especially when their team won.

Lan Kwai Fong

Lan Kwai Fong

Next morning, we headed out to a restaurant not very far from our hotel for dimsum. The breakfast was delicious. Czahreena and Vince helped order and they made really good choices. They also ordered a lot so everyone was very satisfied. The food turned out be pretty inexpensive considering the amount we ate.

Dim Sum - Delicious Meal

Group picture after breakfast

Hong Kong is famous for shopping, so after our delicious breakfast we took a ding ding to Times Square. What's a Ding Ding you ask? and what is Times Square doing in Hong Kong?

This is a Ding Ding, followed by some pictures I took on the streets of Hong Kong. A ding ding is like a tram or a trolley that is double decker-ed. They run on tracks along the roads and are very commonly used. They almost replace buses.

Ding Ding

Streets of Hong Kong

Times Square is a very famous shopping mall in Hong Kong with stores that have all the known name brands. We killed a couple of hours that morning just shopping. You can tell that shopping is a big deal in Hong Kong because all the people - ladies and men are very trendy. More trendier even than the people in China or America. Most people say that Hong Kong is one step ahead of the world in fashion.

Times Square

Entering Times Square

Buzz Lightyear in Times Square !?

Shopping

After window shopping, we decided to head towards a park and maybe hang out by the water if we could find. However, once we got to the park, the boys saw a soccer field and immediately wanted to play. The only problem: They didn't have a soccer ball. How do they solve the problem: They make friends with a bunch of 10 year old local kids who were playing soccer on one of the fields and the kids invite them to play with them! The boys were so happy and immediately started playing! The girls walked around the park and then came across a soccer class for 2 -4 year old boys. This was the cutest thing. We spent a couple of minutes being creepy and taking pictures of them! Later, we headed back to the soccer field where our friends were, to watch the game. It was a very very hot day, so we found a nice patch of shade from which to watch the boys play in the scorching heat.

Soccer with local kids

Soccer class for kids

The boys were extremely excited after their game because never did they imagine that they would come to Hong Kong and get to play soccer with a couple of local kids. Once they got over their excitement and took showers, we headed to the famous electric store and night markets of Hong Kong located in the area Mong Kok. We got there by MTR which is the metro. The MTR in Hong Kong is really great! It took us almost everywhere we wanted to go. It is much cheaper than Hong Kong cabs.. which aren't as cheap as Shanghai ones.

Once we got to Mong Kok we split up for dinner. Vince, Alex and I found a hole in the wall restaurant where they served very cheap and delicious bowl noodle soup! We wiped down our chopsticks and dug in!

Hole in the wall restaurant

We walked around the electronics store and then the Ladies Market. The Ladies Market was cool. They had t shirts, sunglasses, skirts, pants, jewelery, everything. Once we were done with Ladies Market, we headed to the Temple Street Market which I liked better. It had a lot of small silly stuff like jewelery, clothes you'd never wear, interesting and useless souvenirs, toys and other exciting stuff.

Since our China phones didn't work in Hong Kong only a select few of us bought Hong Kong sim cards and the rest of us just stuck to someone who had a phone. On the walk from the Ladies Market to the Temple Street Market, we lost 2 of our friends neither of whom had phones. We had no idea when or where they had strayed away from the group. Neither us nor them had any means of contacting us. So we sent out 2 search parties. One that went ahead and one that retraced our steps. The first group returned quickly empty handed. The second group returned around 40 minutes later with our lost friends. So kudos to Vince and Hakim for not giving up the search and looking until they found them even though the 2 lost kids could have easily found their way back to the hotel .

Markets and Streets of Hong Kong

After the shopping, we found a place to watch the game and that's how we ended our second amazing night in one of the best cities in the world.

Nayana

Macau

Last week was the Dragon Boat Festival and we got a few days off from school so 14 of us planned a trip to MACAU and HONG KONG! woo! We left for the Hong Kong Airport early Monday morning and then took an hour long ferry to Macau. The first thing we noticed when we got the Macau was the 98% humidity! After that, we noticed that there were quite a few signs in Portuguese. This was because Macau used to be a colony of Portugal. We took a shuttle from the airport to our hotel and after settling in headed to a Portuguese restaurant for dinner. It was really good. We didn't order any unusual dishes. We ordered normal meats that were cooked with different flavors and different kinds of gravy.

Us at dinner (Vince, Copp and Winters missing from picture)

Following dinner, we went on a tour and walked by the Grand Lisboa casino, Hard Rock Cafe and some others. We entered one of the casinos and and some of the boys tried their luck at the slot machines and virtual roulette for an hour before we head back to the hotel to rest.

Macau at night (very different from Macau during the day)

The next day, we made our way to Chris's house. Chris is one of the kids on this trip and Macau is his hometown. He is the most gracious host and really did a great job in showing us around Macau, making reservations at his favorite restaurants and helping us out in general. We hung out there for sometime and then took to the bus to a restaurant that is famous for its egg tarts! We all got a few and they were delicious. The store owners had a pet turtle that kept coming into the restaurant. It was really cute.

Our amazing host- Chris

Delicious egg tarts

After brunch, we made our way to the Venetian! It was a mall/casino/hotel. They had all the top name brands and the mall went on forever! They had a fake river with a gondola. We shopped for hours! All the girls bought shoes and the boys bought clothes and shoes and other things.

The Venetian - this is indoors

The Venetian

The Venetian

Gondola at the Venetian

Peek of the casino from up above

After the Venetian, we headed over to a shopping district which was outdoors. It had many food stalls and stores for clothes and food. One store sold Macau sweets and meats and the best part about it was they had free samples of EVERYTHING from butter cookies to almond cookies to savory snacks! We all had a good evening snack there and shamelessly walked out without buying anything.

One of the stalls with the yummy snacks

Shopping place in Macau

Famous Landmark in Macau

Something we were looking forward to all day were the reservations Chris had made for us for a huge buffet at the Grand Lisboa. Our reservation was for 8.30 PM. We lined up at 8 and were first in line! The food looked so good. We were told that the best strategy was to run to our tables and then run and attack the sea food which was the most popular so that wouldn't have to wait for the chefs to prepare second rounds in case the dishes finished. That's exactly what we did! I have never run for my food before but I did this time. The buffet went on forever! They had everything including salad, meat, fruit, dumplings, noodle bowls, sushi, seafood, bbq stuff, dessert etc. It was very filling!

Grand Lisboa

After the very filling dinner, we headed back to the hotel so we could glam up for the casinos. We all planned to go out gambling that night. All the boys wore suits and all the girls wore dresses and we headed back to the Venetian. We took tons of pictures outside the casino since cameras weren't allowed inside and then headed inside to try our luck! We couldn't find any open Blackjack tables that had a minimum of 100 HKD so we headed to the Hard Rock Café where they especially opened up 2 tables for our group. I observed for a while and then went in with 200 HKD. I left when I had 500 HKD in my hand. Yes, I did make a profit of 300 HKD woot! That more than covered the cost of my buffet! One of my friends, Bill, won 1800 HKD.. what!?

That was a great day and we finally turned in at 3.30 am, some of us with heavier pockets and some of us with much lighter.

Next morning some people decided to go jump off of the highest bungee jumping tower in the world! (Mummy, don't worry, I didn't do it.. Skydiving once last summer was enough). Those of us who didn't jump, hung out and watched the jumpers and cheered them on. They all looked soo happy coming down. Some of them paid for their jump with their winnings from the night before. That's impressive. Soon after we headed back to catch our ferry to Hong Kong! I was in charge of planning whatever we were going to do in Hong Kong and will include details of what we did in my next post. For now, wish me luck for my final on Monday!

World's highest Bungee Jump

PS - I am going to add new pictures to Amazing Race post

Amazing Race: Team Win!

On Saturday June 5th, we woke up early to catch the 6.40 am campus bus to get to the other campus (Xuhui). That was the starting point of the Amazing Race that the IPO staff had planned for us. Throughout the day, we had to follow clues that would be given to us and that would take us to different parts of Shanghai. There were 5 teams. One of the rules of the game was to not have more than 2 Chinese speakers in each team. So we had exactly two and boy we had no idea what gems they were.

Contestants

At 8 am, the rules were read to us and the clues were handed out. Each team immediately ran to a corner, took out a map, and began mapping out the stops. It wasn't very easy since we were given clues about the place and not exactly where the place was. Immediately the 2 Chinese speakers, one of whom lived in Shanghai, whipped out their phones, made phone calls and got us the names and addresses of all the places we had to go to. Honestly, the only thing I contributed to the mapping of places besides my terrible sense of direction was the calculation of an integral that was required to figure out one of the clues. We were very thorough with our mapping and soon were the only team that hadn't left the campus yet. However, we were confident with our plans and set out for the metro station. Luckily, the staff had arranged for all of us to have unlimited one day passes so we could use the metro as much as we wanted. Realizing that we were the last ones to leave campus, we started sprinting whenever we could i.e. from campus to the metro station, in the metro station, up and down stairs etc. Soon we were exhausted and decided not to run for a while.

We got to our first stop, finished the tasks of taking pictures/videos and then went on to the second. This one had a time limit, as in we had to get there between 10 - 11 am. We made it in time and the task there was to make 3 consecutive basketball shots within 35 minutes. While one team member was trying to make the shots, another had to run laps around the stadium we were in. It took the girl making the shots all of 5 minutes to make the shots! That was amazing. All the other teams had to struggle quite a bit. After that we learnt a dance that we had to teach pedestrians on the street and video them! We weren't too optimistic about that one.

Next, we headed to the other stops. Some tasks required amazing bargaining powers for which we thankfully had an expert on our team who thankfully also spoke Chinese. She bought us a kite for 10 rmb and a chess set for 30 rmb ( all these were parts of tasks at the stops. Yes, one of the tasks was to fly a kite 20 m in the air for 7 minutes). After some time, it was time for lunch which also had a time limit of 1pm - 2 pm. We met another team on the metro on the way to lunch. They took the wrong exit out of the metro for lunch and thanks to our other Chinese master navigator, Peter, we went out the right exit and were a little ahead of them. We decided to keep our advantage so we sprinted yet again. In our attempt to completely outrun them, we missed our destination and ran an extra 2 blocks! No wonder they say slow and steady wins the race. We stopped running and walked to the lunch location. We were so ready for food after the exhausting morning full of running, walking, kite flying, haggling etc. Unfortunately, there was a challenge first. We had to eat a bunch of things out of which one was stinky tofu. Stinky tofu is the worst smelling thing ever! I had stayed away from it my whole stay here because the smell was so obnoxious. Now, we HAD to eat it to get points. I stopped breathing and gulped it down. The Chinese people on our team actually enjoyed eating Stinky Tofu so it wasn't a problem for them. One of our team mates almost threw up. But finally we were done with it and they served us actual real lunch!

This a famous pose that we had to imitate in front of the temple. We had to convince pedestrians to participate in the picture with us for bonus points

Task - Find this set of footprints.

Finding this was very difficult.

Task - Use super bargaining powers to

buy chess set for as low as possible

After lunch we set out on our mission again. We went to a place that was a former slaughter house but was now a shopping mall. It looked very very cool!

Task - Find this glass ceiling/floor in the slaughter house

Task - Locate this sign in the slaughter house

Task - Make the flower and pot that's in my hand

Task - Convince store owner to let Alex

try on Traditional Chinese Dress

The last thing on our agenda was to teach people to dance. We got bonus points if we could get 8 to dance at the same time however, we didn't want to waste too much time so we just got 3. It took a lot of convincing to make those 3 agree. Once we got our video, we sprinted to the final destination which was Carl's Jr. We were half an hour ahead of schedule and wanted to be the first to be done so we could get the extra bonus points. Unfortunately, a team had already reached there before we did.

Teaching dance steps to pedestrians on Nanjing Road

We all got dinner while the organizers watched videos and awarded us points. At the end of the amazing dinner they announced the winners. Guess who won... WE DID! WOOT! The people who came second were our close friends so both teams were really happy! First place got free tickets for lasertag and second place got free tickets for go karting. We are going to go to both together.

Winners - Joe, Peter, me, Alex, Andrew and Mindy

I absolutely loved this day! We got to see sights in Shanghai that we had never seen before and probably would never have seen if it weren't for this race. The sites we saw were not tourist areas and I'm soo glad that we got to see a different side and a different aspect of the personality of Shanghai. This city is beautiful both the touristy and non touristy parts! We took the metro back home, took long showers and went to bed to rest up after the long and adventurous day that we had had.

Nayana

Beijing: Day 3 and Day 4

We woke up and met in the lobby of the hotel at 9 am. Some of us got breakfast at McDonald's while some us at BreadTalk. It wasn't a bad breakfast! After that, we headed to a store which had fake branded purses, shoes, belts, tshirts etc. on one floor, cheap pearls on the next and real expensive pearls on the next 2 floors. You, had to use super bargaining powers here and I was ready. I saw a pearl bracelet I liked and worked the priced won from 50 RMB to 10 RMB. I also got them to make it smaller so that it would fit me! After that, I decided to go help out a friend who was buying a couple of necklaces and earrings from a person named Sally. Oh, we bargained real hard with her and made her give us an amazing discount by basically convincing her that we'd send 25,000 students from the University of Michigan to her. To support our case a little, we kept bringing over one by one different members of our group who wanted to buy pearls. It was a fun bargain.

The sellers on the floor below where they sold purses were vicious. I had a huge red purse with me and this woman just grabs my arm asking me if I want to buy a purse while looking at the purse that I was holding. I didn't know how to make it more obvious that I didn't want a purse!

Following the Pearl Market, we went to a famous toy market which had stalls that sold each and every type of toy. They had many game consoles and accessories for them. I bought a Wii game for my brother from there.

After this, we made our way to the Temple of Heaven where one of our friends, Andrew Copp, decides to go daredevil on us and tries to jump with both legs onto a really high ledge. He bangs his shin onto the ledge and ends up with a giant gaping bruise. He was okay, but he and 3 others went to the hospital where he got 2 stitches and a tetanus shot. It was a relief that he was smiling through all that.

The last tourist activity of the evening was visiting this really old street that had been preserved and that had many little shops on it. The perfect word to describe the street is "quaint". The shops and the foods available were really really interesting. Too bad my stomach wasn't feeling too well otherwise I would have tried something. After that, 6 of us tried to get taxis back to the hotel so we could get ready for dinner. The first 3 easily got a taxi but when it was our turn we got turned down by 6 - 7 taxi drivers. Did I mention that it was a really really hot day?Only one of the 3 people spoke some limited Chinese so we tried finding a metro stop by asking directions but that didn't work. I think we tried for around an hour after which we found this very kind girl who walked quite a distance with us to lead us to the metro station. We were so grateful to her. We finally got back and got ready for dinner. Btw, this dinner was one of the best dinners of my life!

We reached this really nice area with expensive stores and went into the Hibachi restaurant where we had made reservations for 12 people. They mixed up our reservations and told us there was only room for 4. Fortunately, we had a Mandarin speaker with us who gave them a piece of his mind which fixed all the problems and also got the staff to give us "Sorry" drinks! We were so happy!

HIBACHI GRILL

This part of the day was SO great that it requires it's own section. This was an All you can eat- All you can drink for 200 RMB ( ~$30) restaurant! You could get whatever you wanted off the menu and the Chef would make it right there in front of you. The food was AMAZING! There was a bit of EVERYTHING and everything tasted marvellous! Some of us got hot Sake which was an interesting drink. Even without the drinks, everyone's mood instantly got much better ! I think we ate continuously for 2 hours. YUM! Some members of my family would have LOVED this place (right Papa, Bhaiya and Gaurav?)

Now to burn off a small fraction of the calories that we had consumed, we went out dancing! It was a very very fun night!

The Chef

Hibachi Grill

The next day we went to an art district which was very interesting. There were many buildings in which different artists displayed their work. We walked around there for a couple of hours and then headed back to the old street where we were the previous day.

One of the art exhibitions

For dinner, we had the famous Beijing duck and then packed up and left for the airport for our flight back to Shanghai. The airport wasn't crowded at all and security check took 5 minutes. The boarding process was very smooth and the plane took off on time. They served a good snack and drinks on this 1.5 hour flight! I was super impressed with the whole process. We got back to campus around 1.30am, woke up our ayees and went straight to bed!

This weekend was one of the most satisfying and exhilarating weekends I've ever had! I'm glad I went and I had a great time with all the people who came to Beijing!

Nayana