Sunday, February 27, 2011

Arriving in Hong Kong/Tuen Mun is a welcome culture shock


If you've been following my travels at all, you know I'm spending the next few weeks in Asia. I'll be in Hong Kong, the New Territories portion of HK called Tuen Mun (at Lingnan University), and Singapore.
The blog post previous to this described the challenging flight out here but as soon as I got to my hubby all felt right ;) He's currently in Tuen Mun, HK from January to mid-May on a semester abroad. He's an International Business major with concentrations in Finance & Mandarin back home in Nashville at Belmont University. We wanted to take the opportunity for him to be able to study abroad and have some great adventures. We planned this trip for me to come out halfway through and spend some time  together! And oh has it been an adventure!
We took a taxi back to his campus at Lingnan University. That ride itself was the beginning of a welcome culture shock! Hong Kong has a beautiful way about it. As an American, it's not a typical "beauty"... it's hard to describe... You can tell it's a city based in history, culture & tradition. The majority of the buildings look old, dirty & rundown at first glance. It's something you don't see as prevalent in America but it's the norm here. But it's incredibly beautiful... in it's own amazing way. I'm hoping to have time next week to just walk around and take photos so you can see what I mean. It feels like things are either new construction where a historic building has been, or it's a building that's been there for hundreds of years.
I am staying on campus in the visitors hostel. I was a little worried because to be honest, my husband's hostel is incredibly sparse, tiny & loud. All of us with food allergies know that everywhere we travel, we try to find somewhere with a refridgerator and maybe a kitchenette. Thankfully, the visitors hostel was completely different from his dorm. It is definitely not a hotel but a hostel and for $30/day it's perfect! They have a flat screen TV, kitchenette (perfect for cooking with my allergies), study room, free wifi & free laundry facilities. The security is high-tech with two different keypads to use for entry to your room.
Once we got inside, I found that my adorable husband had this waiting for me:
The flowers were beautiful & he had written the sweetest card ever. He also had traveled an hour there and an hour back to an organic health food store in HK called "360". It's in Central HK and is truly the equivalent to Whole Foods. It's even more expensive though, which I
never thought was possible ;) He got me some already prepared dinner: brown rice with grilled peppers, cranberries, walnuts & chili sauce as well as some roasted pumpkin (which seems to be a big thing out here). It was really delicious and a welcome break from all of the snack food I'd been eating the last 24 hours. Also, I opened the refrigerator to find:
I never knew that unsweetened almond milk would make me so happy! He had also found some organic walnuts & bananas since he knows my favorite current breakfast consists of all three ingredients together like this:
Next, we realized we had a balcony! Here's is my amazing sunset view for the next 2.5 weeks!





It was a great welcome and we're having a blast! I'm obviously a little behind in blogging so you'll see several of these posts all together at once but hopefully I'll catch up today while the hubby is doing homework & I'm watching the Oscars here in Singapore. Later!

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