If you're into shopping and/or eating, you'll love Hong Kong. I don't think that I've been to a place that's as dedicated to shopping as this post-colonial anomaly. The enormous shopping malls cater to the high end tastes of the visiting Chines. The teeming markets cover off more mundane tastes – from food to gadgets. While, at night there are yet more markets offering a myriad of choices, from clothes to knock offs. To be honest, I find it so overwhelming that I end up buying nothing.
Where once Hong Kong used to be a place to pick up bargains, it's now in danger of pricing itself out of the market – that's unless you happen to be a visiting Chinese millionaire (fortunately, there appeared to be a lot of them). For me, the prices are much better in Vietnam – that's prices for both the knock offs and the real thing.
So, instead we mainly concentrated our time on another form of consuming – food and drink! On my first night here, having just flown in from Guilin, pretty much the whole ship decamped to a Star Ferry that Silversea had chartered for the evening. As we cruised around the harbour, the champagne flowed freely and we enjoyed its famous neon-lit skyline peering from behind the clouds. In fact, there was such a convivial atmosphere onboard, that people seemed to enjoy the social side of things, just as much as they enjoyed the sightseeing opportunity.
The next day, whilst exploring Hong Kong Island we stopped off at a random restaurant for Dim Sum in the Wan Chai district. We're no aficionados of Chinese food, and we had no idea what we were doing (no-one there spoke English), but we stumbled on a really tasty feast. By the end of our over-indulging our way through the mountain of food we'd ordered, we vowed that we'd never eat again.
However, we'd forgotten that we were going out for Peking Duck that night with some friends from the ship. So, that evening, I struggled my way through yet another culinary cornucopia, and very good it was too.
In a place where excessive consumption seems to be the order of the day, I think that we've blended in well!
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