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Sunday, April 17, 2011

Departure- Hong Kong!!! Honeymoon Day 1!

This post is for April 16 and 17, as with the time change, the only thing we did on the 16th was get on our flight to Hong Kong, as it was a nice, long 14.5 hours!

The wedding was amazing!  We couldn't get much sleep as we got to the hotel at 2am, had a 6am check in for our flight and I needed to get what felt like a bottle of hairspray out of my hair before boarding the flight.  Graham had a 2 hour "nap" and I looked through photos on my point and shoot to relive the last few days.

For those who only got snippits of info, or don't know where we went on our honeymoon, we did: Hong Kong, Bangkok, Thailand, Chiang Mai, Thailand and Phuket/Karon, Thailand. 

We woke up SUPER excited for the honeymoon, as it was MUCH needed!  We knew it was going to be a LONG flight after a few long, tiring days, but would be all worth it in the end.  We were lucky enough to get a flight with a stop over in Hong Kong, and even luckier when I called Air Canada, "pulled the wedding card" and they let us have a night's stay with no extra cost before taking our final leg to Bangkok, Thailand, instead of waiting 8 hours at the HK airport!

As there are too many photos to choose from and so much to write about, the honeymoon posts will be a day by day recap of photos with explanations of where we were, what we were doing and any fun things that happened in the moment!  It was the trip of a lifetime, and we were very fortunate with 40+ degree weather (how that is fortunate, you'd never know!), as it was the start of monsoon season when we arrived, and it should have been 30 or less with torrential rain daily (only 1 day of rain!).


Tired, but excited to be heading on our Asian adventure!


I barely ate at the wedding, so I was STARVING.  I had a surprisingly DELICIOUS smoked salmon bagel at the airport, with a NOT so surprising $10 price tag.


Trying out our new camera, you can turn the screen around to take better self portraits...yet we couldn't get one with both of us looking!


Yup, that's right!  HONG KONG!  The flight was long, but actually pretty good!  We ended up getting seats with LOADS of legroom and had the best air stewardess!  She brought us champagne, yes even at 8am, and made sure that we were first to be served our meals WITH whatever selection we wanted!  She was fantastic and it made for an great LONG HAUL flight!


Our first view from the plane of Hong Kong.  It was torrential rain and what looked like mountains and ALOT of high rises.  The rain didn't stop for 12 hours!


Welcome to HONG  KONG via the Victoria Peak Tram. 


We took this tram up to Victoria Peak, right after checking into the hotel and getting a taxi.  We were so tired and excited, we didn't think that the rain would possibly cause us to have ZERO view at the top!


When you are a new husband/wife, it's easy to be this happy, even after 40 HOURS of not sleeping!


That's our view having barely left the tram station.  It would have been incredible if sunny! 


Chinese market at the top of the Peak.  SO colourful and pretty!


Graham looking slightly tired at this point!


Ahh...commercialism.  Unbelievable. No, we did NOT eat here!



I wish I could have gotten a better pic of this...but it said: "Mind your coughing manners"  HILARIOUS!


leave it to the Chinese to still try to take photos of...nothing but FOG!


Did you know chilis grow on trees?  We didn't!  They were GORGEOUS trees and so fragrant!


It was a gorgeous hike down the peak.  We only did part of it, as it was getting very dark and wet and there isn't any lighting once you get further down the peak!



We went to explore downtown and find Times Square and Chinatown.  It's a lot smaller than NYC, but pretty fun, with some MAJOR expensive shopping!



We plan to!


We wandered to Chinatown to find some dinner, as we were starving at this point!  Was it dinnertime?  Breakfast?  Lunch?  Bed time?  We had no idea!


It's crazy busy here.  There was also so much to look at, I think I almost lost Graham 10 times!


This guy is the epitome of multi-tasking.  I was in awe.  He was on his phone with one hand, while butchering a chicken with a meat cleaver with the other, swapping meat cleaver for a boning knife by throwing either one in the air and hoping it sticks into the cutting board.  All the while, shouting at other customers to see what they wanted, and yelling something in Chinese at me for taking a photo of him!


Our rule on our honeymoon: eat ONLY where locals eat, and maybe one person that looks like they might speak English so we know what we might eat.  Here, the restaurant was packed, no one spoke English, we were starving and wanted NOODLE bowl, so we risked it and decided to get something that looked "safe".  IT WAS HOT HOT HOT, but YUMMY!


No matter how many people try to teach me how to use chopsticks...I CAN'T.  At this point, Graham wanted to take my photo because everyone was staring at me.  Maybe because I couldn't use chopsticks, maybe because I was the only white person and had blonde hair!  I was proud of myself, as I accomplished eating my whole bowl, it just took me this tactic below to do it!


I call this the "put both chopsticks together and scoop the noodles into your mouth as close to the bowl as possible without making a mess" method.  Seriously though, we don't know what was in the soup other than noodles, spice, dumplings of some sort (AMAZING ONES) and some thing that looked like a pork spring roll, but definetely did NOT taste like it! 


The streets of Hong Kong on our way back to the hotel.  It was this dark at 6pm and we were exhausted from 40+ hours of being awake.


Our gorgeous hotel (Cosmopolitan).  We got upgraded from their sister hotel (Cosmo), due to them being full!  It was interesting that it was an upgrade, as the bed was still too short for our legs not to hang off of them and thank goodness we were so tired, as we both just fit in our "queen" bed.  We slept 7:30-4am this night, which was impressive, due to that being 7:30am-4pm Canadian time, and my insomnia was in full force up till then!

Well, that's day 1!  So much more fun to come!


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