Vietnam Adventure: HONG KONG: Food and shopping paradise

It was always my huge wish to visit a place where "East meets West". I heard many stories about Hong Kong, about its skyscrapers, shopping malls, people and food from all over the world… All of that in a small territory of 1,104 km² located on the south coast of China.

Let me start with some facts. Hong Kong is one of the most expensive places to live in, with an average price of $4,406 a square foot for houses and $2,625 a square foot for apartments. At the same time, it is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, with its population of around 7 million people. It consists of 3 big islands (Hong Kong Island, the Kowloon Peninsula, the New Territories) and over 200 offshore islands.

I decided to spend my first day in Hong Kong admiring Hong Kong’s skyline. I read somewhere that there are 1,223 skyscrapers in Hong Kong, with more buildings higher than 150m than in any other city. Skyscrapers in Hong Kong are very tall and narrow due to the high prices of the real estate. Interesting detail is that apparently more people in Hong Kong live or work above the 14th floor than anywhere else on Earth, making it the world's most vertical city.

The Central–Mid-levels escalators is the longest outdoor covered escalator system in the world. The entire system covers over 800 meters in distance and elevates over 135 meters from bottom to top.

Tissues in all colors and patterns.

There are many new buildings in Hong Kong, but there are also old buildings like the following one.

This guy was very funny, he was singing something in Chinese and I asked my friend what was it about, he told me that he was singing about how good his food was.

So I had to try it and yeah, this coconut wrap sandwich was really good :)

In Hong Kong people drive on the right side.

Hong Kong is also very famous for its food, which is a fusion of east and west. Most famous dish in Hong Kong is dim sum. It is hard for me to define what dim sum is, so I found a perfect definition on Google: “A Chinese dish of small steamed or fried savory dumplings containing various fillings, served as a snack or main course”. There are all kinds of dim sum and many restaurants use more and more imagination to create new ones in order to atract food lovers. Luckily, I made friends with two people from Hong Kong (with a little help of Facebook and Couchsurfing) so they took me to a great restaurant to have my first dim sum. I loved it, first of all-it looks amazing. Secondly, I like this concept of having small snacks with an option to order many different flavours so each bite is like entering in a different world.

Here is the list of some dim sum dishes that we tried:

Pork Dumplings with Crabs Egg (Siu Mai)

Beef Meatball with Sun-dried Tangerine Peel

Fresh Shrimp Dumplings (Har Gow)

BBQ Pork Buns (Cha Siu Bao)

Pineapple Buns

Etc…

One of the coolest random things that we saw was a guy dressed up as Elvis proposing his girlfriend by singing on of the Elvis's songs.

Here is how beaches in Hong Kong look like by night.

The contrast between old and new.

Next day we were also exploring the city, trying some street food and walking around the markets.When you walk around Hong Kong it is impossible not to notice how everything there is about shopping. You can find shops and shopping malls on literally every step. I'm sure that some people would be really excited about so many shopping possibilities, but I personally wasn't really interested. You can find shopping malls everywhere, what I wanted to experience was Hong Kong culture. My Hong Kong friend made me laugh by saying: "There is no culture in Hong Kong, there is only shopping culture".

Afterwards, our couchsurfer took us to Stanley, which is on the other side of Hong Kong Island. The weather was foggy and rainy, but from the bus I was able to see how beautiful nature Hong Kong has. As soon as you get out of the city centre, you are already in a jungle. Hong Kong Island, as well as all the surrounding islands, is very mountainous with many beautiful sandy beaches. Unfortunately, the weather was very bad so I don’t have any picture of the beaches. But, I have some pictures of the market in Stanley. It is all about shopping…

The subway can get REALLY crowded.

In the evening we went to try some street food.

Dessert on the right was the craziest thing I tried in Hong Kong. It is made of black beans and there are some weird spices inside, which I can't define. But this is very popular dessert in Hong Kong and everyone in that restaurant was eating it.

Afterwards we had some more desserts...

It was Saturday night so we ended up in Lan Kwai Fong to see how does nightlife in Hong Kong look like.

Third day we decided to spend on Lantau Island, where Ngong Ping and statue of The Big Buddha are. But before that we visited a small fishing village. Fishing market was amazing, with all kinds of dried fish. I was like a little kid there, walking around and asking questions about the fish. We had some seafood in the restaurant and it was amazingly fresh. But there is the other side of story about that village. People that live there are very poor. Statistically, Hong Kong's income gap is the greatest in Asia Pacific and you can see how it looks like when you go out of the city center.