Monday, September 26, 2016

Hong Kong arrival

I left Paris at 11:30 Saturday night and arrived in Hong Kong Sunday at 6pm. I managed to sleep the last 20 minutes of the 12 hour flight - not exactly the best use of my flight time. Also it is weird when you lose almost a day in a plane. But the HK airport is very welcome - modern, clean and bright. All signs are in both English and Chinese so it was easy to make my way to Immigration.

The immigration officer was not at all smiley but he was efficient. In fact all lines moved quickly.
My baggage arrived promptly and the taxi signs showed me where to catch the red taxi for urban destinations - so far so good!

Stepping out of the airport I was surprised to see it was already dark. In Paris it stays light until at least 9 even now so having already lost the day I was quickly thrust into evening mode.


No wait for the taxi. Of interest my driver had 4 different Samsung phones attached to his dashboard. Each seemed to have only one purpose. Made me wonder if men's phones also struggle with multitasking. Maybe phones are cheap here?
The urban view sucks if you are on the 17th floor

Checked into a lovely room at East Hong Kong and proceeded to put my things away. The suitcase I bought yesterday has a 3 point locking system, one of which stubbornly refused to open. After trying everything in my repertoire I called the front desk. A very lovely young lady offered to send an engineer who might be able to help. She advised me that he might need to break it to open it, and asked  "would I be happy with that". I managed to communicate that I would not be at all happy but it was the best offer I had heard so far.

A team of 3 engineers arrived and drilled through the lock in no time. Imagine the look on my face when the revealed contents bore no resemblance to my affairs! Yes the suitcase was identical to mine,. Yes it had a priority tag just like mine. No it was not mine. What to do? First to the mall next door to find essentials in case my suitcase remained out of my reach for the night. The mall had pretty much everything I needed, including a skating rink in case I missed Canada too much!

Yes the shopping mall has a skating rink


One more airport trip to do the switch, offer to pay for the broken lock and call it a day. 
Welcome to Hong Kong and my comedy of errors!

2 comments:

  1. Oh no! What a way to begin! Hoping the rest of your trip is less eventful...but good memories to be made.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I had a good laugh and it felt I was in a conversation with you. :)

    ReplyDelete

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