Hong Kong With My Besties
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After my first year in the US, I went back home in the summer to visit my family and friends in Thailand. My high school friends and I were planning to go somewhere outside of the country together, and we decided to visit Hong Kong. For us, Hong Kong was such a perfect place to travel because of all the delicious food (especially dim sum), convenient transportation, and Disneyland! The trip consisted of Stang, Pin, Ploy (not me), and myself. Although we missed one of our roommates Prim, it turned out to be a great trip, and we wish to gather again like that in the future.
A lot of pictures shown here are us being happy throughout the trip, but none of you would ever imagine that we encountered a level 8 typhoon there. We sort of expected that it would rain because it was still the rainy season in Hong Kong, but, believe me, Typhoon was so out of control. The typhoon scale is out of 9, and the one we experienced was 8. Two out of four days we were there were just pouring all day long, and the wind was incredibly strong. However, we managed to have fun and went to see a lot of indoor spots instead.
Talking about Hong Kong, we, as a hungry high school group of kids, thought a lot about good food and snacks. We did try a lot of famous restaurants over there.
Tim Ho Wan, a dim sum place. This place was very famous for its dim sum and got such a good review on google. Our hotel was so close to this place, so we decided to get our first meal in Hong Kong here! Kai Kee Restaurant. We went there to taste barbeque porks and crispy pork belly before going to the avenue of stars at night. The place was quite clean and huge, and the food was delicious—10 out of 10 from my meat-loving friends. Hong Kong Congee. There are plenty of them, so I couldn’t recall where we have been to. Plus, it was pouring like crazy that day. A lot of snacks! We tried some Hong Kong waffles, egg tarts, chive pancakes, and mango smoothies. All of them were great. It seemed like we were there to enjoy the food.
Besides all the dishes we tried, we also went to see several places in town as many as we could fit in the not-so-pouring window each day. The above are some pictures of Nan Lieng garden and the Chilin nunnery, which are located in the very heart of Hong Kong. You can see that the nature of the place is very contrasting to the background of the skyscrapers. It was such a breathtaking shot for me. We also tried to go to Yaumatei Tin Hau Temple, which is a really famous temple, but it was closed due to the Typhoon that we also didn’t expect to encounter.
We spent a whole day in Disneyland, and it was an amazing place as always. I think the more friends you go with, the more fun you will have! Plus, Disneyland snacks were also pretty good and helped us kill our waiting time. Anyway, when we were back to where stay, we also went to see the symphony of lights and the avenue of stars as both of them are pretty close by each other. It was fun for us to try taking candid pictures (for example, don’t-look-at-the-camera shots).
Well, although some unusual things happened on our trip, it was an enriching trip after all. We were flexible enough to make the trip as complete as possible. One day, we needed to visit the science museum instead of seeing some more important landmarks, but we didn’t get so salty because of that. That was what I love about traveling with friends: it’s always fun even though you can go nowhere.
Before this trip, I had never been to Texas or New Mexico. Initially, our plan was to visit only Big Bend National Park in southern Texas, near the border with Mexico. However, we stumbled upon a blog where the author mentioned that there are several other national parks not far from Big Bend. In fact, the area is home to four remarkable parks– Big Bend, Guadalupe Mountains, Carlsbad Caverns, and White Sands. Despite their proximity, these parks are incredibly distinct from one another. We thoroughly enjoyed exploring the unique natural beauty each had to offer.
After we found out that there are some flights from Willard (a regional airport in Champaign) that are inexpensive, we started flying out from here instaead of Chicago. We got a really good price of plane tickets to Seattle, so we decided to go to more national parks! The two parks that we visited were Mount Rainier and Olympic National Parks. We thought about going to North Cascade as well, but the time was limited so we planned to visit there next time. Visiting these two popular national parks in the fall was such a good choice–less crowd, nice weather, and fall foliage!
Midwest surprisingly offers us many national parks to visit all year round. One of the national parks near Illinois is the Mammoth Cave National Park in Cave City, Kentucky. We rented a car from Champaign and drove around 5 hours, excluding small stops in Indiana. We had never been to Kentucky before, and we believe that not many international students had been there. Plus, this was the first time we visited a cave in the US, and we start with the world’s longest known cave system!
We’d been thinking of visiting South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore and Badlands national park for almost a year. Then an opportunity came when one of our friends gave us a buy-one-get-one-free coupon from Delta. We did not hestitate even a bit in buying two tickets for a round trip from Chicago to Rapid City, SD. Although it was an impulsive trip, we had a lot of fun observing the wildlife in the great plains of South Dakota and North Dakota.