Next Stop: Hong Kong!
May 1, 2017
The first day of May was a rough one in terms of travel. I had to cut my afternoon class short in order to get the bus in order to get the train in order to get the bus or train to get near Narita (airport) for Tuesday's morning flight to Hong Kong, where I will be giving a presentation and working with a friend on her great comparative education research on global education in HK, the US, and Singapore.
It took us 4.5 hours to go from Soka University to our hotel near Narita. Tokyo Station is huge, and the signage is, well, challenging at best. Meanwhile, my neck/shoulder is at a pain level of about 7/10. I hadn't eaten since 10:30am, and all the restaurants at the airport closed at 9pm (we arrived at 9:10pm). Fortunately, the hotel restaurant was opened til 11. I don't like eating dinner at 10, but I was hungry!
By the time I got to bed, the pain level had reached at least an 8, and it took a couple hours to finally get to sleep. We rose before 6 to catch our plane. At one point, I looked out the window and saw an even cloud layer and Fuji the only thing towering above the clouds. Beautiful! Of course, my camera was packed in my back pack in the overhead bin. I did get it down for our time as we were getting into Hong Kong:
By the time we caught the train and a taxi to our hotel (much more smoothly than the Tokyo ground transport experience!), we had 15 minutes before my friend Greg and his husband arrived to give us a tour and go to dinner. They took us from one end of the city to the other on a double decker tram
We got out at a large open market:
NOTE: June 2018 date on post is republish date, not date of the event.
The first day of May was a rough one in terms of travel. I had to cut my afternoon class short in order to get the bus in order to get the train in order to get the bus or train to get near Narita (airport) for Tuesday's morning flight to Hong Kong, where I will be giving a presentation and working with a friend on her great comparative education research on global education in HK, the US, and Singapore.
It took us 4.5 hours to go from Soka University to our hotel near Narita. Tokyo Station is huge, and the signage is, well, challenging at best. Meanwhile, my neck/shoulder is at a pain level of about 7/10. I hadn't eaten since 10:30am, and all the restaurants at the airport closed at 9pm (we arrived at 9:10pm). Fortunately, the hotel restaurant was opened til 11. I don't like eating dinner at 10, but I was hungry!
By the time I got to bed, the pain level had reached at least an 8, and it took a couple hours to finally get to sleep. We rose before 6 to catch our plane. At one point, I looked out the window and saw an even cloud layer and Fuji the only thing towering above the clouds. Beautiful! Of course, my camera was packed in my back pack in the overhead bin. I did get it down for our time as we were getting into Hong Kong:
By the time we caught the train and a taxi to our hotel (much more smoothly than the Tokyo ground transport experience!), we had 15 minutes before my friend Greg and his husband arrived to give us a tour and go to dinner. They took us from one end of the city to the other on a double decker tram
A Main Street
Scraping the Sky
Pedestrian Overpass
The marketplace from the tram
This place is Everywhere!
We got out at a large open market:
Our friends told us that this fruit is so stinky is is not allowed in restaurants!
Someone's fish dinner
Fresh fish!
Meat Market 😏
We stopped in a "Hong Kong McDonalds" (FaSoLa Cafe) for a cup of coffee, then proceeded back towards our area on subway, followed by the world's largest system of escalators to an area called SoHo, where there are lots of international restaurants. We picked an Italian one, where Dick and I both had a delicious steak, and Greg and Sean both picked burgers. Great day, overall.
Hong Kong seems more relaxed, more multicultural, and less organized than Japan. There are modern skyscrapers and old, dirty apartment building going 20-30 stories up. I couldn't live here, but it will be fun for a few days.
NOTE: June 2018 date on post is republish date, not date of the event.
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