The Adventure Begins and what an adventure so far!
July 5th, 2007 by Zofia
After a crazy farewell at Wellington airport yes my family were ALL there and it was a good thing, no real time for tears because there were so many to hug and so much going on it was all a bit of a blur.
Arrived at Auckland airport to be greeted by more family and in the end I think there may have only been about 3 close family members who I didn’t see before I stepped on the plane out of NZ!
So despite the craziness of all the goodbyes, I finally got on a plane from Auckland to Hong Kong at 11.30pm on Thursday 5 July 2007. Being stuck in Economy wasn’t much fun as there was no room to move at all, this was not helped by being in the middle of a row of seats. However, the fact that every seat had its own small TV screen where we were able to do a multitude of things – watch movies, select music to listen to, check where on a map of the world we were located and check on the progress of the flight – was a good distraction from the cramped space. I had a lot of trouble sleeping as I could not get comfortable and every time I moved I seemed to bump the TV remote and turn the TV on, so it was rather frustrating. I ended up watching two films Music and Lyrics, which I enjoyed, and Bridge to Terabithia, which I loved! (This was a great film Nicky, well done to you and your animators!)
Eleven hours later we finally touched down in Hong Kong. It was 7am Friday 6 July 2007 local time (this meant it was 11am Friday in NZ) and the first thing we noticed was the heat! It was crazy just how hot it was especially considering the early hour. The next thing we experienced was something Rachel and I came to enjoy and be impressed by Hong Kong efficiency! During the whole time we were there we found that organisation was a strong point of the people we dealt with (for you Stats people reading this, I think the people of Hong Kong are mostly ‘B’ people!! And being a ‘B’ person myself, I really enjoyed it!) We had transfers from the airport arranged and when we spotted our names on a sign the man gave us all the necessary documentation, sent us off to the next person who gave us stickers to wear and ushered us to a waiting area, we were then all asked to follow another person who led us to the busses and loaded us on the various busses according to our stickers, and then a little while later we were being dropped off outside our hotel! Very efficient!
After checking in to the hotel room and having a shower and changing into shorts and a t-shirt instead of jeans and more NZ winter clothing Rachel and I decided to venture out onto Nathan Road, on the Kowloon Peninsula where we were staying. By this time it was 11am and was now even hotter outside. We walked for quite a while up the road and eventually decided we had seen enough and turned back wondering what we had done, why we had decided to come to this city, it was all a bit much to be honest.
Later we realised we had been walking up towards the poorer end of the street and there was more hustle and bustle and interesting things to see in the other direction. We tackled this end of the street later in the evening once we had rested and cooled down back in our air conditioned hotel room. We also made the decision to book ourselves in for a couple of different tours for the next two days so that we would actually see the sights and get a better feel for Hong Kong because up until that point neither of us were really sure about the destination we had chosen.
That first evening when we ventured to the better end of the street we also managed to find a visitor information office and grabbed a few city maps so we could work out where we were and so on. We couldn’t believe how far up Nathan Road we had actually walked that morning, it was crazy! And then to get to the visitor information office we had walked just as far in the other direction. Even at 8pm that night it was still sweltering hot! It was all just such a surreal experience, and was only day 1!
