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The nine-course meal was definitely tasty, but the nine-courses were very similar to what you'd get at a Chinese restauant in Canada. And each dish was served to you by your waiter (on dish shared among 11 people). So the portions were quite small. Considering we had paid $410(70cdn) for this, I expected a more, eat-as-much-as-you-want attitude, like we got in Beijing. Some complained to the guide, so he got us an extra dish. I didn't walk away hungry and I thought the food was quite good, but others on the trip, said they had found better food on the street. I think overall it was cheaply done, but I think it was more the tour guide's fault than the restauarant. Either way I wasn't overly disappointed because the atmosphere was excellent, even though I found the slight rocking of the floating restaurant nauseating.
Our only other stop on the night tour was up The Stubbs Road Lookout which is about halfway up the mountain and looks out over the lights of the city. The view was spectacular! However, the area was so packed with tourists that we had to fight to get to the front and then had to keep moving for others to take pictures. Once again it too foggy to get a great picture, but I had one of the locals take a picture of me with his good camera, and then give it to me in a frame. After we had taken our pictures, we had to move out of the way for others so I think in total we only stayed there for about 10 minutes, but I guess it was long enough. If you go to Hong Kong, take the day tour, but you might want to skip the night one.
We got dropped off at our hotel at about 11:30pm, so we decided to venture out to find some night life. We tried the hotel bar, but it was empty so we went out in search of a decent bar. We walked around for about 20 minutes, but couldn't find one. A stark constrast from Korea, where you'll find bars everywhere. We kept walking and ended up in Wan-Chai, which as we found out is sort of like the red-light district of Hong Kong. There were "mama-san" types, trying to pull us down into their bars, promising beautiful women, but as they have the same kind of places in Korea we were wise to it. The sign on the door says $20 beers (a bargain when you divide by six), but once you get down there you find you have to buy the girls drinks at $100-$200each and then when you leave they may hit you with a "table-rental charge" of another $100 an hour and up. So, we skipped by those places and found a quaint little place called Mes Amis.
The place opened up to the street and was full of locals and travelers. The prices were a little higher than I'm used to, the cheapest beer was $70 ($11 Cdn), but we had been walking around for awhile, so we ignored the high prices. Jong-soo and I were commenting (in Korean) about the hookers in the area, when a Korean girl within earshot, scolded us for using foul language. You'd think it'd have been safe as we hadn't really seen any Koreans in Hong Kong (except on the plane of course). I really didn't use a bad word, I think what I actually said was, "That girl out there is really pretty, too bad she's a hooker." but the girl accused me of using a more vulgar form. Anyways, I don't think she was really annoyed, I think she just was curious why a whitey was speaking Korean in Hong Kong because, after she scolded me, she seemed more interested in finding out where I lived, had studied, etc. Anyways, we left not too long after that, dodged the aforementioned ladies of the evening and went back to the hotel.
We got up fairly early on Sunday and had another kick-ass breakfast! Our only goal for the day was to get to Macau. We had planned on going earlier in the morning, but the tour guide from the day before (other than trying to sell us one of their Macao packages) told us that there was no real hurry to get there. So we wandered around before making our way to the Macao ferry station. Jongsoo had to call his boss to tell him that he wouldn't make it to work the next day, so he bought a phone card and we each made a couple calls. We took the subway down to the ferry station and got in line for a ticket. Now the word "ferry" is kind of a misnomer. The "ferry" to Macao is actually a 400 seat hydrofoil running 24 hours a day. They leave every 30 minutes during the day and then run every hour over night. I whisks you the 65km to Macau in under an hour. I'm sure they're damn expensive. We paid about $300(50 cdn) for round trip tickets. Leaving at 12:45 and returning at 8:20pm.
From what I know of Macao, is that it was once a colony belonging to Portugal, but now, like Hong Kong, it has been handed back to China. They also have their own monetary system (also separate from Chinese Yuan). It's actually worth exactly the same as the Hong Kong dollar. We had to bring our passports and go through immigration leaving Hong Kong and then once again to enter Macao. After we got through all of the crowds and walked out of the ferryport at about 2pm we were immediately surrounded by people trying to sell us something. Everything from tours of the island to foot massages, and other various other cheap and tacky souveniers.
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