A weekend in Hong Kong...

I hope everyone had a good weekend. For the most part my weekend was very relaxing. The main highlight of the weekend was lunch at a revolving restaurant in Hong Kong. The restaurant is on the 66th floor of one of the tallest building in HK. Every 90 minutes the platform of the restaurant rotates 360 degrees with breath taking views of the city. With the spectacular views, there was also very interesting food items on the buffet. I tried duck feet, ox tongue, shark fin soup, and another part of the ox. Surprisingly the ox tongue was not very tough and the shark fin soup had a very unique taste. The duck feet was mostly bone and skin, I'm not for sure the nutritional value in feet, but there wasn't much taste.

For the rest of the weekend, Hong Kong was fairly laid back. I watched the IU-Michigan football game, where I was almost left speechless with the outcome, but unfortunately IU still lost.

On Thursday, October 1st it will be the national holiday for the People's Republic of China. Supposedly there will be a fireworks show in the harbour of HK. An interesting fact another exchange student told was that China's military budget doubles every year. In Beijing for this year, the military is suppose to show off what they have done in the last ten years with their innovation in military equipment. With their high secrecy of the government of China, this show would be very impressive and kind of scary to see what they have done over the last 10 years without the rest of the world knowing.

Big Buddha

Hi Everyone!

This past weekend I went to see the "Big Buddha" statue on Lantau Island. The statue was very interesting to see and something you should do if you visit Hong Kong, but the surrounding area was even more brilliant. All around the statue you could see green Islands as far as the eye could reach. Unfortunately, the haze around HK is very bad where you can't see very far.

CEBU

If anyone is interested in traveling to the Philippines, I would highly suggest Maribago Blue Water Resort in Cebu. The whole weekend was awesome. I made the trip with several of my friends from IU (Abe and Lili) and two girls from Canada (Katie and Kelsi). We flew directly from Hong Kong to Cebu and landed about midnight in Cebu International Airport. For the first night we were night scheduled to stay in the resort, so the Taxi driver took us to a cheaper option just feet away from the resort. I must say that the hotel was interesting and looked a lot sketchier at night instead of in the day. Everything turned out great though and we were just steps away from the resort for the next day.

The first day at Maribago turned out to be a little rainy, however we still had a lot of fun. The resort had an American style buffet that was included with the room. It wasn’t that bad of an imitation to American food. After dinner we had drinks at a bar that overlooked the ocean. (You can see most of the photos so far if you click on the slideshow that is playing to your right.) The resort had a private beach and island available to its guests. On the beach there was a life-sized chess set.
The rooms were the thing that stood out the most for the Maribago. We had a bathroom with a tub that was surrounded by rocks. (The pictures will provide a much better description).
Saturday was the most eventful day of the trip. We started the day at 10 with an Island hopping trip. The boat left from the hotel, but to get out to the boat we boarded a smaller boat that was pushed by locals for only about 100 feet that we could have walked anyway. Later I noticed that about three or four boats full of locals would wait by our resort all day looking for tourists to use this service.
The island hopping tour’s first stop was about a 30-minute boat ride away from the resort. On the first island we snorkeled and laid out on the boat. The snorkeling was amazing; we were able to see some very interesting, beautiful fish. The next island was a private island that was reserved for trips like ours. After returning from the tour, we had a native Philippine meal. Most of the meal consisted of different types of meat with unique sauces and several types of seafood. The most unique thing I had was octopus. The dinner included a show with Philippine dancers.

The next couple days included rest and relaxation by the pool and ocean. Overall, I had a great time in the Philippines, it was a nice break from two tough weeks of school (just kidding).

Off to the Philippines

I am going to be in the Philippines from Thursday to Monday. When I get back, I hope to post pictures of my travels. I will be in Cebu, Philippines and staying at the Maribago Bluewater Beach Resort.

Pictures

I was just able to upload my pictures to the blog, so now you can see all the pictures I have taken in Hong Kong. The application is located on the right side of the page.

Not quite Vegas

This past weekend I went to Macau. Which is located about 1 hour away from Hong Kong. Macau is considered to be Vegas in Asia, however I would have to disagree with that strong statement. With experiencing both over the last month, I would say that Macau is just a fraction of Vegas. Don't get me wrong, I had a great time. However, Macau just does not give off that vibe that Vegas is enthralled in.

This was the view from our room. We stayed at the Regency. Its amazing how hard the beds are in both hotels I have stayed at so far in Asia.


We ate a Cantonese restaurant in the MGM. I tried diced pigeon. After dinner, we walked through a couple casinos. They seemed to be smaller than the ones in Vegas, however the Wynn Casino was very large. We played some blackjack in one of the Casino's (I lost about $20), so it was similar to Vegas because most people aren't that successful. Then we went to a club called D2. I had a great time there. Eventually we were joined by many other students from the Exchange Program (there were about 200 of us there). The picture below is taken from D2.

After an eventful night, many of the exchange student took part in bungee jumping from the highest point in Macau. The jump is largest in the world and measures in at 233 meters. As you can see below, this is the tower they were jumping from. There was no way I was going to do this, but it was pretty amazing watching many of others do it.

Overall, I had a good weekend. It was interesting to see how Asia tried to imitate Vegas.

Wait! I actually have to go to school?

Well hello again! Above are the pictures from the beach trip to Discovery Bay including the dinner we had the overlooked the sea.

This week has been mostly filled with school activities. My schedule consists of Mergers and Acquisitions, Economies of Hong Kong and Mainland China, Economic Strategy and Game Theory, Introduction to Work Behavior, and Science and Technology: Past and Future. It should be an interesting semester, hopefully the classes won't be too hard. All of my professors are Asian but speak decent English. Several actually studied in the United States, one taught at Northwestern and the other went to UNC.

So the week has been fairly uneventful, however I did experience my first Chinese movie theatre. A group of us went to see Inglorious Bastards at AMC. The movie theatre was very small compared to American theatres. We actually had assigned seats. You can see below the mall that I was talking about earlier, it is amazing how big it is. This weekend we are planning on traveling to Macau. Macau is considered to be Las Vegas in Asia. It is about an hours ferry ride away from Hong Kong.
I hope everyone has a great weekend!