Hong Kong - first impression revised

October 24th, 2007

So, a few more words on my first impression: When I arrived at HK airport, I took the airport express train to the city ($HK 100, approx. 10 EUR single ride). After a 20 minutes ride, I’ve arrived at Hong Kong station on HK Island in the Central district. I’ve stayed in the underground where Jens picked me up. He said that he wanted to give me a breathtaking first impression of HK, and so we went to the subway station of the red line without leaving the underground. The subway system in HK packed with people even in the evening hours (it was already around 7.30), exactly as you imagine a busy Asian capital.. Maybe not as busy as Tokyo is, but for me it was already pretty crazy. You’ll see a lot of more high tech gadgets like Blackberrys, Sony PSPs, Nintendo Handhelds and other stuff like you’ll see in Europe. Everybody is doing something, wether it’s playing on their mobile devices, doing phone calls (most of the time using Bluetooth Headsets), or whatever.

The Subway System itself is damn huge. Every station I saw, and even the small ones, are bigger than our mainstation here in Bochum They’ve got at least ten exits or so per station. The trains are all controlled by a computer system without drivers anymore. That makes the arrival times very precise. You usually don’t have to wait longer than 4 minutes or so, pretty cool.

Anyway, Jens and I took the red line to Kowloon, Tsim Sha Tsui station, or TST as the locals say, a statin directly on the river. So the first thing I saw when stick out my head out of the subway, was the breathtaking skyline of Hong Kong island on the opposite side of the river. I was not tired anymore or something else - just thrilled how amazing it looked at night. But that was not enough: We arrived there a few minutes before the big lightshow begins (every night at 8pm) where most of the famous buildings on HK island do some funky light effects while we we’re listening to the corresponding music on our side of the river - all in sync. I’ll put a video of that spectacle online, so that you can get a better idea of how that looks and how crazy that is

on airport express train