One Year Away

Joseph

On the train ride to Hong Kong Penny
updated our expense tracking spreadsheet and we were pleased to find
that to date we were significantly below budget.  Since arriving in
HK we’ve been living the high life and have eaten up a large part of
that surplus. 

Here’s one of the many ways to blow
your budget in Hong Kong:

• First, arrive on a long weekend
  when most of the guesthouses are booked solid. 

• Have the hostel where you do have
  reservations put you into the bedroom of one of their employees. 

• Leave the next morning and check
  into a nice hotel in the Sheung Wan area.  The Central Park Hotel
  has newly renovated rooms, hot showers with decent pressure and high
  speed Internet access in the room. 

• For lunch, have dim sum, the
  traditional and delicious Cantonese lunch, every day.  Dim sum in HK
  is the best we’ve had anywhere but can be surprisingly expensive.
  There are two types; 1) the mid-range places which are about the
  same size as the average dim sum restaurant in Canadian Chinatowns.
  They serve up good food about on par with what I’m used to back
  home.  2) Then there are the high-end places usually located in
  shopping malls. These huge restaurants attract a mix of customers
  including a large number of business people.  Food at the high-end
  dim sum places we went to was fantastic.  It was definitely a notch
  above what I get back home.

• For dinner, go out to the trendy
  Soho area where the hip expat community hangs out.  There, eat at
  one of the dozens of nice restaurants.  We ate at a Thai restaurant
  that served a delicious green curry.  The prices were definitely
  expat prices though.  To really blow a budget stay in Soho and go
  out for drinks, like we did with my friend Samuel!

• Go shopping at the night markets
  in Kowloon.  Although the prices can be good by HK standards they
  are generally much higher than in mainland China. 

One of the highlights for me of Hong
Kong has been visiting my friend and ex-coworker Samuel.  We
hung out
several times during our stay here and had a great time catching up
on what we’ve each been doing.  Although he’s been here less than a
year he knows the city well and has been a great source of local info
for us.

Penny and I had a great time blowing our budget in Hong Kong.  There’s a million ways to do it and I would like to come back some time to try a few more.