How to Blow your Budget in Hong Kong

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.