Finally arrived in HK

Well after a long flight from Halifax to Hong Kong, lasting over 24 hours we have finally arrived. After arriving at the terminal we met our school principal who arranged transportation back to our apartment in the New Territories of Hong Kong. With a few minor supplies already here and a few furnishings from IKEA, we were ready to start our new adventure in HONG KONG.

Our apartment is in an area called Shatin. Our block is connected by a covered walkway directly to a large shopping plaza which has the nearest MTR (subway) stop.

It takes us about 5 minutes to the platform and another 5 minutes to our school.

We are about 30 minutes to Kowloon (mainland downtown) and about 45 minutes to Hong Kong Island. Transportation here is all done with an "octopus card" which is a prepaid card good for the MTR, buses, ferries, trams, and any other public transportation the city has to offer. It's also very cheap, it's only about $0.50 to our school.

We've had a chance to explore the area. The shopping plaza is where we spent a lot of our time initially, looking for things for our apartment and just checking out what's to offer. We also went to the seaside and discovered a nice little park.

So far, we both are really enjoying ourselves. It's really an East meets West culture here where almost everything is in English and you can find everything.....well most everything. An example would be, we found Kraft Dinner in the supermarket. I guess we aren't really used to this where Korea was a very closed market country, the few things that were imported were always taxed super high. People are friendly and most information has English on it. I guess it's the Brittish influence for over 100 years that makes it more westernized than the surrounding Asian countries.