BK Traveling Adventures: 5 year anniversary in Hong Kong

Who would have guessed?

See our amazing weekend on the next page

So, with our Chinese visa, which is good for 10 years, we are only allowed a 60 day entry. This particular job had us staying far beyond 60 days, so we were going to need a "Visa Trip." In a nut shell, we had to fly out of the country, and then come back to start a new block of 60 days. Katie got a clear weekend, and after looking over our options, we agreed upon Hong Kong. We were only going to be there for about 36 hours, but as we do, we packed a bunch into that time.

Our hotel room view

It also, just so happened, to be around the time of our 5 year wedding anniversary. If you'd told me 5 years ago that we'd be in Hong Kong, I don't think I would have believed it. But there we were.

Arriving in the afternoon, we settled into our extremely classy hotel the Grand Harbour view.

That night, we ate in the hotel restaurant(That just so happens to be on the top floor), and for the first time in 2 months, didn't have Chinese food. In fact, we did a tasting of eight different dishes. There was a live music and the atmosphere was just wonderful.

After that, we just enjoyed some K-pop (Korean pop music) on TV and rested up. The weather report for the next day was for a lot of rain, so we hadn't planned on doing very much, maybe a tiny bit of exploring.

Shoutout to Scott and Teresita, another FOS married couple who was in Anning with us. They had been to Hong Kong several times before and lent us their "Octopus" cards. Basically, you load the card with money and you ride the public transportation.

This system was so intuitive and easy to pick up. Moscow was far more complex

Their public transportation is something I have to compliment. We've been on our fair share of subways and buses around the world now, and Hong Kong might of been the easiest system to figure out. We were riding all over the city in minutes.

For lunch, I did the most american thing I could find; I found a burger joint.

Basic foreigner meal

And it was very good. End of story.

Our only real goals after that were to find a couple of stores that weren't in Anning. For Katie, that was a Lush store, and got some bath-bombs.

The bath soaps we got lasted the rest of our stay

For me, it was a bit of a pilgrimage to their Warhammer store. Talked a good bit with the Manager, (He said his name was "Ranger"), and I even picked up a rule book.

Found it

It was at this time we started to see that, not only was it not going to rain, but the weather had just decided to be gorgeous. A warmer climate than we were used to, but no rain, just sunshine.

So, on the spur of the moment, we decided to make our way to the other side of the city and see their giant Buddha statue, The Tian Tan.

Again, because of how great their transportation system is, it wasn't hard to get there, just about 45 minutes on the railways. But in order to get to the statue, hidden up in the mountains, we had to take an elaborate and beautiful cable car.

And it was an amazing, never gonna forget, once in a lifetime experience.

You can also hike a trail to the statue

The ride took about 20 minutes or so, going over trails in the woods. Just a breathtaking view, and we were so lucky with the weather.

And after the ride, the destination was also really cool.

And then we got to ride the cable car again.

We had an empty car to ourselves on the way down

You just can't stop him from being a dork

Just a lot of fun, surprising because we thought it would just be raining the entire time. But our trip wasn't over yet. For dinner, we scoped out a Mexican restaurant because tacos sounded like the greatest food ever to us.

Now, as it turns out, this restaurant is a bit hard to find. It isn't exactly on the street with a huge sign. More like hidden away in an ally. It oozed a cool vibe, and according to Katie, we probably weren't cool enough to get in. Didn't stop us from having the best food that weekend tho.