Showing posts with label Hongkong. Show all posts

Macau Day 3 - Dim Sum & Discovery of Custard Buns

My full team for the Macau trip. :)

Macau in short - I believe has better than food than Hong Kong and it's the land that I first discovered a pau that I love!! Custard buns are awesome! I've been told to tried that pork buns but we were too full to eat anymore so we had to give that a missed.

Tips you will want to take note - NEVER try going over during the weekend/ph/holidays. It's just OMG. I spent one hour just trying to get through the customs and even had to fight my way out. Thank God that I can be thick skin when I need to, else I'll never get through the customs. Be kiasu at this time, it's crucial and will do you good.

One of the beautiful place near the ship dock port, walking distance.
A popular place that all tourist will head too, the road to st. Paul
See that white banner with golden words on the left?
I believe that's the popular pork bun place! It's the same road while heading to st. Paul

Finally we see St. Paul ruins! It's actually just a wall left. Everything else is gone.
See the white pao?! That was the awesome custard bun!
I can't remember the Chinese restaurant name but it's on the second floor.
Suppose to be the best Portuguese egg tart!
Inside the Vatican looking hotel/mall. It's a huge place!

We didn't go much places as we only spent one day there and took a boat back to Hong Kong during the evening. It's a beautiful place at night and loads of couples are there for their wedding shoots.

I was really sad when we had to leave the next day back to Singapore as I've made great friends over there and goodbyes are always heart wrenching for me. Partly also because it means that my life is back to work and routine again.

WHAT?! $5 bucks instant noodles?!

On a happier note, here's a picture of me and my $5 bucks instant noodles on Tiger airway. I'm really disappointed that they even ran out of blankets to sell!! It's ridiculous.


And... this amount on food souvenirs.
I won't be surprised if my bag weighted 5kg. haha!
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Hong Kong Day 2 - Ocean Park, The Peak & Drinks!

Before heading off to Ocean Park, we headed to this famous breakfast place at Jordon Station. Had yummy scrambled eggs set with milk tea. You can find more information here on how to get there.

Famous breakfast place that sells scrambled eggs, milk related products and bean-curd.



We gave Disneyland a miss as my girl friend and myself have been to a one in another country. We headed to their local theme park instead, Ocean Park. Their theme park was split into 2 portions. What I really enjoyed best was the long cable car ride. It was really beautiful as we can over see into the long horizon of the small island and ocean around Hong Kong. The rides are average and to me, I think it can be improved a lot more.


The best ride ever! Love the beautiful scenery in the cable car ride.

We left Ocean Park pretty early after we were bored and headed to "The Peak". Wanted to take the Tram up but the queue was so bloody long! One and a half hours!! After a whole day of queue-ing, I am pretty sick of queue-ing already.

Beware of taxi drivers that are out of their cabs, wanting to fetch people up. We tried asking one guy and he charged us almost $30 Singapore Dollars! We were taken aback when we know how cheap taxi are in Hong Kong. So I asked my friend who went up before how long he took by bus, he told me about 15 mins! 15 mins will only be about $15 Singapore Dollars actually. So we ignored him and went to the other side where a lot of people are alighting. Grabbed a cab who is willingly to bring us up to the Peak and the price was half of what the crazy driver offered.

The peak view at night! Really pretty.

We also had an awesomely hard time coming down the peak. The bus queue, taxi and tram queue were all so long! We tried to get a taxi but it was almost impossible, so we've decided to take the bus down as they have fixed timing which is pretty frequent.

We met up with one of my Hong Kong friends for a drink after that. He brought us to a place at TST called 諾士佛臺 （Knutsford Terrace）. That whole area is a drinking lane hidden in a corner of TST and it's pretty cool.
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Hong Kong Day 1 - Airport, MongKok

Here's my review on HK during our 4 days 3 nights. Overall, it was an eye opener trip. This whole trip was rather free and easy with a day out to Macau.

Goose noodles.
We bought our air tickets from tiger airways and it's my first time on a budget airline in Singapore. My last flight on an internal budget airline in Korea was really bad. We were squashed side by side like how you'd stand in the MRT during peak hours. You have no space on the side as well as the leg portion. Good thing  the flight was less than an hour and we slept through the whole journey. Initially, I was against tiger but after hearing from my girl friend that it is not as bad as what I though, I have decided to give it another try. Yes, it wasn't so bad... just that we had no blankets (I didn't know) during the journey and it was freezing cold. No food as well. Imagine $5 for instant noodles?! The whole journey took us about 4 hours and finally we were at Hong Kong airport!

If you think taking budget airline is horror? Wait till you reach Hong Kong airport... We had to walk 10mins to the sky train and from the sky train, walk another 10 mins to the check out counter. No, it's not the end yet. We queued literally an hour to just get out of the arrival counter to retrieve our luggage. It was pure horror for me as I have never in my life experienced such a massive crowd before.

Two things in mind when you are in Hong Kong.
  1. You will spend half your time in a queue.
  2. You will guaranteed be squash in the crowd many times during the journey.
When we were finally out, we went to find our tour agent to get a free ride to the hotel. We purchased our deal from deals.com.sg. Please look out where your hotel is before purchase as we didn't our original hotel was located in Tsing Yi. It was an almost inaccessible from where we were, so I had to head down to the travel agency and asked for a change of hotel. Of course it doesn't come free, so we had to top up an additional $61 per person to move to Cosmo Mongkok Hotel (Mongkok). We were fine with the top up and would have gone with the upgrade anyways.

All hotels in Hong Kong are said to be really small and it is really small. No more than 2 people per room. We gotten ourselves a pretty decent room. The toilet was the open concept style which lacks a little privacy as the glass doors are semi translucent and no lock. There is free wifi on the ground level of our small hotel. The staffs there are friendly and able to speak in Chinese. I believe they could manage English as well as I've seen quite a handful of Caucasians around. Cosmos MongKok Hotel is about 10mins walk away from Olympic Station and about 15 mins walk away from MongKok Station. We found out later that taxi are relatively cheap in Hong Kong and it's pretty safe to take them and we pretty much cab around the next 4 days in our trip.

That's the semi translucent toilet behind me.
Overall Room Size

Street life around our hotel area
August is the school holiday season as well as the sales season in Hong Kong, do expect a larger crowd in general. We went to the night market at Temple street, it's almost like a blend of Bugis street and pasar malam in Singapore. Personally, I don't think there is a lot of things to purchase there but interesting to walk around. My Hong Kong friend mentioned that is a tourist spot, most locals don't go there to shop at all. They can be quite rowdy with Caucasians, to get them to their stalls.

Super yummy Oyster with egg

Shopping for clothes are generally much more expensive in Singapore somehow, even though they have sales. We shopped mainly at Tsim Sa Tsui as it's like Orchard road in Singapore. Try out their yummy street food! Smelly tofu and their famous mango desserts.

Stuffing our faces with mango desserts at è®¸ç•™å±± Hui Lao Shan
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