Weekend getaway to HK and Macau

Hello!

This post is a #throwback. The one good thing in not having lectures after wednesdays are long weekends. And long weekends are excellent traveling opportunities. So in october we waved Singapore goodbye one friday morning and took a flight to Hong Kong. The public transportation is well organized, and cheap! From the airport, we took a local bus to Kowloon (for you who don't know, not the HK island) where our hotel was.

Friday was merely sightseeing and catching up with old friends studying in Hong Kong. We had lunch in a fabulous organic restaurant called Mana - just go there, you'll love it! After our highly healthy meal we wandered around the city center and went to Victoria Peak to take the mandatory tourist pics. It is true, the Hong Kong skyline is beautiful in the night - but Singapore's is pretty during the day too ;). Late evening drinks and we were off to bed, for saturday was going to be all about hiking!

On saturday we ate way too much in the hotel breakfast buffet (who wouldn't?) and hopped on the MTR . Our destination was the Lantau island and -at least we thought so - the big buddha. At Lantau we had to take a local bus to the other side of the island, where we wandered in a little fisherman's village. Seriously, I have no idea what their problem is, but they have an issue with dried fish. And dead fish. And some were barely living! I have to say I didn't quite get the attractive part of the smelly dried fish, but there's gotta be something to it. After we had enough of our chinese experience we started our hike. With extremely good instructions: "Follow to sea shells." Hmm. Ok, got it..? :D Well, it soon came clear to us that big B is not on our hike, but the views were astonishing! Funny to imagine how in one city, there can be so much variety in terms of surroundings. I led our group up some stairs and up to a path going somewhere - I had seriously no idea, and neither did anyone else - but we hoped to find what we were looking for. And so we did, and incredibly beautiful infinity pool in the middle of the mountains! The water was extremely cold, but totally worth it, after our long hike! =)

At some point we started feeling hungry, so we headed pack to the city, got changed and went for italian. The evening continued with a french bar and…

Sunday was a bit more challenging.. :D More sightseeing, avenue of stars and dim sum made our day together with drinks at Ozone. In the evening we left to Macau, the weirdest place I've been so far.

Macau's casinos were full of crazy chinese people gambling throughout the night. The old city was actually quite pretty with the chinese-portuguese mixture, but the city was much more chinese than Hong Kong. I didn't see a single cafeteria in the city, apparently there are some though. On monday we headed back to Hong Kong by boat (costs about 15 euros!) and from there back to Singapore. The mini vacay was well needed, for we had been in Singapore for almost a month without traveling!