This travel story starts a bit differently that most of the others I've seen on Steemit so far, so I figured that I would join @heiditravels in the travel section and share!
The Setup
In August of 2015 I was laid off from my job as a derivatives trader when the group shut down (Lots of stories on that, for other posts). Being 23 and already fed up with the career I had chosen, things got a bit dicey from there as I entered an quarter-ish life crises. I had a little bit of money saved up and decided that I would take the time to switch careers into software engineering (which I did, successfully! Things are awesome!). But first, I had to do something weird and adventurous while I focused on learning how to code.
That decision turned into a decision that I would be leaving the country to... somewhere, on September 16th. I couldn't decide where to go! So sure enough September 15th rolled around and at about 11pm I absolutely had to pull the trigger. While cruising ticket prices, I saw that I could go to Central America for ~$500, or Hong Kong for ~$650. Being in the U.S., I was amazed at how small the price difference was. So, it was sealed. I was gonna get real weird and real adventurous by leaving the country for the first time and flying all the way to the opposite side of the world to stay in Hong Kong for a month.
The Adventure
Having no time to plan any further, I booked two nights at what I thought would be a decent and cheap hotel so that I could spend the first two days figuring out where I would stay for the remainder of the month.
Note, this is an absolutely terrible idea. Never do this. Or do it, but make sure you aren't flying into a super busy place on a Wednesday night when all the affordable and decent housing is already booked for the entire weekend. Things get real expensive, real quick.
Image of Hong Kong at night taken from Victoria Peak "The Peak" (sorry for the fog) which was arguably one of my favorite views ever
So I flew in at night and took a cab to the "hotel". Turns out, you should say faaaaaaaaaar away from any building in Hong Kong that has the word "Mansion" in it, of which there are a few and they are pretty infamous.
Chungking Mansion was pretty frightening. It looks alright from the outside, but inside it's a crazy web of a beaten down flea-marketesque place. Note: this is the one photo I'll share that I didn't take and it was pulled from govoyagin.com
When I got to the "hotel" (that actually turned out to be a really crappy hostel) around Midnight on Wednesday, I was a little beside myself.
I'll reserve the name of the hostel because they actually ended up treating me alright in the end, refunded some of my money when I left early and didn't give me any grief about it.
But I showed up, got shown to my room, and within 30 minutes discovered there were bed bugs everywhere, hiding from the light. When I turned the lights off for five minutes, then back on, you'd see them all scramble for the shadows. So what did I do at 1AM? I decided that sleep wasn't happening, whipped out my laptop, and sat there for hours contacting Airbnb's and looking for another place to go. As I mentioned, This was going into the weekend. All the hotels had already skyrocket prices or were fully booked and I was on a budget.
This continued for the next three days. All I did was walk around, sit, contact a crapload Airbnb hosts, get rejected by them all, walk around some more, sit, contact, etc. All of this with my backpack packed to the brim and a laptop bag around my shoulder (it's all I brought) in 80-90 degree heat. I couldn't leave my stuff in the hostel, because I didn't want the bed bugs laying eggs in or on any of it and bringing that home with me. The nice part was that I got to see a bunch of Hong Kong while walking around! Here are some of the things I found:
Awesome Architecture:
As I was told, this building was built with a hole in it in order to let the dragon spirit in the mountains to the south of it through to the harbor, because otherwise it would be bad luck. Superstition is apparently huge in Asian culture and makes its way into the corners of every day life.
Beautiful views of the Harbor
There's much more as well, but this post is getting quite long so I'll leave off here and update with the rest of the story tomorrow! Essentially, my first four days were spent walking around with all my stuff on my back trying to find a place to sleep that night and being scared shitless that it would end up being the street.
Two nights I ended up not having any other choice but to shell out $200 bucks for a hotel of which neither were worth that much money by a long shot. On the fifth day, an Airbnb contact came through, and the family that took me in was so awesome the trip was completely saved. But more on that next time!
Interesting
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