Farber Fund Trip to Hong Kong

Trip leader Andrew Christianson, Drew Peterson, Sean Flynn, Jessica Yearous, Luke Sharpe and I are on a Farber Fund trip to Hong Kong. Jeannette Nygaard, an MPA student from USD, joined us in Hong Kong as well. The next few days I will make a few posts on the trip.

For some quick facts on Hong Kong, see the Wiki link here. The Hong Kong Tourism website is here. It was handed-over from Britain to China as part of the 99-year lease of the New Territories. While Hong Kong and Kowloon were not actually part of the lease, Britain handed them over anyways.

We are staying on the north side of Hong Kong Island.

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We left for Hong Kong the morning of Wednesday, August 15th at 11:00 AM CDT. After stopping in Minneapolis for a couple hours, we left non-stop for Tokyo around 3 PM. We arrived in Tokyo on the 16th at 4 PM (4 AM CDT) and left for Hong Kong at 5 PM. After entering a different time zone, landing in Hong Kong, going through customs, collecting our baggage, and catching a shuttle we got to the hotel around 12:30 AM (11:30 AM CDT). The grand total on travel time came to just over 24 hours (26 if you count the time spent at the Sioux Falls airport).

That night we went out and grabbed a few beers and a kebab before going to bed around 4. The next morning we went to pick out the fabric and design for our personally tailored suits at Maxwells. I ordered one suit and three dress shirts. It was much more fun than I expected, once I overcame the paradox of choice (and my lacking fashion sense).

The rest of the day was spent walking the streets and trying not to spend any more money after our suit excursion. That night we rode a ferry across the harbor between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon during the "Symphony of Lights." We ate dinner at Gaylord's Indian restaurant, which had a live Indian band playing. The rest of the night was spent sampling Hong Kong's night life.

This morning we swam and laid out at the rooftop pool. We ate lunch at a great Japanese restaurant in Kowloon. The wasabi made my eyes water. After lunch we took a tour at the Hong Kong History Museum. It was probably one of the better museums I've been to. It covered both geological and human history of the Hong Kong area, which has been inhabited for over 6,000 years. The history of the Opium Wars was probably the most interesting part of the tour. During a presentation on recent Hong Kong and Chinese history, the Tienanmen Square Protests were referred to as "the June 4th, 1989 incident." I guess that's one way of putting it (I'm actually kind of surprised I was able to get at the American version of the Wikipedia article on the "incident").

After the museum we went to a street market containing pirated DVDs, fake watches and bags, and other junk. I'm going to buy a Folex watch before I leave. Tonight we're going to take it kind of easy as we leave for China's second Special Administrative Region, Macau, in the morning (which just this year passed Vegas in gambling revenue) pending the fallout from Typhoon Sepat that just hit Taiwan.