July 31st, 2013.
It’s day 31 in Hong Kong now and I’d thought I’d add to the list I started on Day 9.
#11 Whenever you give somebody your credit card here, they take it with both hands and give it back to you with both hands out of respect.
#12 The subway cars (for the most part) don’t have separations or doors, so you can walk right through to another car if you want, which is really nice and smart in my opinion. It’s weird seeing all the way down the train when it bends around a corner!
#13 Hong Kong has an Octopus Card program (much like London’s Oyster Card) that enables you to purchase small things super easily if you have one. I love that I can buy a drink, a magazine, and get in and out of the subway with the tap of my card!
#14 Asians in general eat much smaller portions of food than Americans. My family and I always joke about how the restaurant staff must think we are fatties when we go to our favorite Japanese place and order all these dishes of food 🙂
#15 My name always gets spelled “Chole” instead of “Chloe” when I tell it to people! After it happened more than once, I theorized that it is probably because the sound “kl” in “chloe” isn’t used in Chinese or Asian languages, so people aren’t familiar with how to pronounce or spell my name! So funny.
#16 Turbo Ferries!!! Hovering Ferries! Star Ferries! What more must I say? Hong Kong’s ferries are awesome.
#17 My lucky number so I am dedicating this one to HK’s famous Pink Dolphins aka Chinese White Dolphins. There are only 61 of them left, and their population will continue to decrease while HK builds a bridge to Macao and if the airport reclaims 500 more hectares of their habitat. If you don’t know what these dolphins look like, you should google them–they really do look pink when fully grown! It is so sad to hear about these adorable dolphins, the mascots of Hong Kong, coming closer and closer to extinction because of human actions…..just another way we are hurting our planet….
#18 A word of advice if you ever visit Hong Kong–don’t trust Google maps. It won’t tell you about the ups and downs and connecting pathways and flyovers, etc. We tried to use it today and it was a dismal failure. The city and getting places is a lot more complicated than it seems!!
#19 Umbrellas aren’t just for rain–they’re for sun! People here don’t want to get tan. They hate what the sun does to their skin, so on sunny days you will see people with UV-umbrellas out! So anti the American way…”Tan tan tan me Sun! I’m so pasty white! Whiter than you! I need a tan! You look so tan” and so on.
gemerocity.com 