About Me

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Whitestone, New York, United States
I just recently finished teaching English in China for the past 2 years. This year I will be studying Chinese at Shenzhen University. I graduated from F.I.T. in 07', my major was Illustration. For now art will be put to the side and my adventures in China will begin :)

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Hong Kong

Yesterday I went to Hong Kong. I went because I wanted to buy a new small digital camera and Hong Kong is the place to go if you know the price and how to bargain. So I went with Shedisha. Getting there is kinda a trip on it's own. Hong Kong is not part of china so you need your passport and a valid visa to get back into china. You literally go through customs and fill out forms. A teller stares at you as if they are going to say "this is not you..." and not let you through. But in the end I made it with no problem. There are these people there with thermometers that run up on you and point it in your face to make sure you don't have AIDS or something! O.o Shedisha told me she got scanned on the way back last time. I was almost hoping they would... I mean come on Shedisha and i should be prime targets for some crazy foreigners disease... but alas not this time.

We walk over the river in a totally enclosed walkway to Hong Kong. At this moment you are in no man's land. You're not in China nor Hong Kong. Rachel suggested we do a dance, but I think I will save that for the next trip. I was on a mission and I had places to go. We arrive on the Hong Kong side just to go through the whole give papers and passport routine again. Which I found kinda silly cause you seriously can't go anywhere once you pass through the first check point. But I guess it's just procedure. So they stamp my passport a few times and now I'm officially in Hong Kong.

Now I understand that this may be really cheap of me, but we need to get rail passes and those damn things cost $39. Oh yeah Hong Kong uses their own version of a dollar for those that don't know. So yeah I thought that was ridiculous. Especially while in Shenzhen I never pay more than 10 kuai to go from one side of the city to the other. Here I just wanna get to the city center area and they wanna rape me with a $39 price tag, and that's just one way. O.o We buy our tickets and head into town. Now sorry Gary if you read this but at first I thought you were named after a train station. But thank God it was Kow Loon Tong and not KaLung Tang, but it did made me laugh for a bit.

We go to meet a new friend of Shedisha's. She went the previous weekend to get her hair done by a wonderful African lady. Shedisha was there so late that the lady made her dinner and let her stay the night. Her name is Mary. When I go back I will definitely take a pic with her, she's really pretty too! She speaks French and has a wicked accent, it's pretty cool. So we meet with her for a bit to use her comp. She promises that next time we come she will cook us some jalaf rice, not sure what it will taste like but Shedisha swears i'll love it. So Mary tells us where the best places to go shopping for cameras are. So we head off to there.

To sum up the whole shopping thing we basically walked into several stores asking for the camera I was interested in, what's the price, and what does it come with. All of them are out of the price range that I was willing to pay which was quite discouraging. Until we stumble into another store and the dude there finally was the first person willing to bargain with me unlike the previous stores. Oh before I forget, nearly everyone speaks some bit of enlgish in Hong Kong which definitely was a welcome break from trying to buy things with my limited mando. He tells me a price much closer to what I wanted to pay so I go check a few more stores and decide to get it from him. I was originally gonna get a Cannon since I like thier cameras and that's what I am used to. I paid for the Cannon and he keeps talking to me as he waits for the other guy to get it. He asks me why am I getting that particular model. The reason I wanted it was because it had the best ISO for the Cannon cameras at 8 megapixels. He then proceeds to hand me another camera telling me that this one is way better. I understand this is his job, so I entertain him by looking at it. It's a Pentax which I know of. He takes pics with the Pentax and the Cannon showing me the difference. The Pentax kinda blows the Cannon out the water. And the ISO is 6400 versus 1600 on the Cannon. So I ask how much and it's almost $1000 more. I tell him thanx, but it's way too much!! He tells me that he'll give me a special price and lowers it to $1800. I still tell him it's too much. I tell him I live in China, i'm not a tourist with American dollars to spend, I have chinese money. He asks why are we here in China and we tell him, we are teachers. His face lights up, he tells me he will give me a really special price because we are teaching his Chinese people English and now drops down to $1600. This is now $300 more than the Cannon. I sit and think for a sec and he has me sold. I buy the pentax. He hands me his card and tells me to send friends to him for their camera needs. I thank him again and I go skipping into the sunset with my spiffy new camera at half the original asking price. So I did take a couple of pics of Hong Kong. I can't figure out at the moment how to move pics in this blog to differnt parts instead of it going to the top. So when I figure that out, I will edit this and stick the pics in. But all in all, it was a good day and I got something better than what I wanted and at a great price too.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

oooooooommmmmmmmmg hahahaahhahahahahahahahahahahahaha...u killed me with the Gary part...soooooooo funny....omg......i laugh out loud n I'm at work! in the break room...ppl was staring at me like "wtf" haha....that brightens my day analiese. thanks.

by the way...watch out when u're in kow loon tong...its like a ...motel district. well sum part of kow long tong is good..but...waatch where u going

anyway....hahahahahahhaha...i needa tell gary about this....so funny...hahaha ...great now i'm jus gonna crack up everytime i see gary haha

Hu said...

LOL... pictures Al Pictures!