Some loud kids were making noise at midnight again, this time it sounded more like they were in the hallway. I had to get up early for the airport, so didn't bother to go and investigate. My flight was at 10:15am, so I figured leaving at 7am to get to the airport by 8am would be plenty of time. When I got there I was having trouble finding my flight on the board, weird... I went to the check-in counter to find out the flight had been delayed by 5 hours to 3pm due to bad weather in Hong Kong - I think there was a typhoon or something - and they had sent an email about 6pm the previous night. Too bad it goes to an email I only use for important stuff and don't check often.
So now it's 8am, at least they let me hand off my suitcase, and my flight doesn't leave until 3pm...
Lucky there's a place called Changi City Point nearby on the train line which has a convention centre (useless) and an outlet mall (great). I got there at about 10am but most things were still closed like usual. The Nike Factory Store opened soon, but had the same prices as the stores in the city. Nike Free models were "discounted" from $190 to $150, and if you were lucky a few had a "second discount" to $110. Other stores were pretty much the same, but there was a good discount food mini-market place at least.
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| Everything is closed. |
That burned a couple of hours, and I went back to the airport for lunch. Best vegetarian options were Qizno's and Pasta Mania, which I settled with - a "small" margherita pizza which would have been better described as "tiny" and a "strawberry desert pizza" which was alright, but the cream cheese started to get a bit too sweet by the end.
There's basically nothing else to do at the airport besides visit the Cactus Garden (which takes about two minutes) and walk around, but at least they have free intranet. As the new departure time was inching closing, we got another update that put the flight back again from 3pm to 4:30pm, even though the news I found from Google said the bad weather mostly missed Hong Kong and was starting to clear up.
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| 10000 Needles. I wish someone got that joke... |
We finally did get to leave at 4:30pm, as we neared Hong Kong at 8:30pm we had to circle around for another half hour because of the weather, or other plans, whatever. There's not much more annoying that being stuck in the plane going around in circles with the occasional boost of the engines to maintain altitude - just drop out of the sky already! Finally we landed at 9pm but it basically ruined any plans I had for the day, since I thought I'd be arriving at 2:15pm instead.
I thought because of all the delays and backed up arrivals we'd be landing into chaos at the airport arrival terminal, but somehow it was a breeze, and after tracking down the Airport Express train terminal and an ANZ ATM, I made it all the way to Hong Kong station in about an hour. There is about 50 exits marked on the map at the station, so I picked one that looked like it was headed in the right direction and got out at the street level, right as the rain started. I soon found out the being at street level is not a good place for a person to be, everything happens on overhead walkways around here. So I went back into the station, only slightly rained on, and found a better exit on an upper level. This got me across the mega expressway (Connaught Road) and into somewhere slightly less busy. The roads were still a bit hard to navigate in the dark, as there are a lot of small laneways and bends in the road. Probably not the most direct route but once again I found the hotel without getting lost.
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| A train with a progress bar, what an invention! |
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| Rainy HK. |
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| A sad dinner. |
First thoughts on the hotel was about all I got to do for the day:
- An alarm clock!
- Free breakfasts!!
- Quiet hallways
- Still super slow lifts
- Still pretty crap TV channel selections, but the Australia Channel is back again
STEP-O-METER: 21052 steps
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