February 18, 2016, by Danny Bav

Life has been so hectic.

Picture the situation, I’m all ready and packed up to travel abroad with my friends and suddenly there’s a huge crash on the M6 and we possibly might be late to our flight. Fortunately, our taxi driver knew a route avoiding the motorway, so we were saved… or so we thought. Our friend Beth messaged us to tell us she had a puncture on the way to the airport and they had to turn back. Despite this unfortunate turn of events, we all made it to the airport in one piece. After checking in we casually strolled towards the currency exchange booth at the airport to pick up Ieva’s currency that she ordered a few days ago. Little did we know that it would be shut as the person on shift was stuck in the M6 traffic, eeek – not a good start! We waited for as long as possible for the currency shop to open, before deciding to go through security, where the words “LAST CALL” glared on the screen as we cleared security. Immediately, we ran towards our plane and boarded just in time. It was quite intense, but after a few hiccups and 24 hours of travelling, we finally made it to our destination – Hong Kong.

I have so many memories from Hong Kong, but here were a few of the highlights:

• The first day we had to relocate rooms in our hostel and a small looking woman had entered our room in the morning. Initially, I thought she was sharing the dorm room with us, but turns out she wanted us to relocate. The only problem? She didn’t speak any English. She started to blurt out strings of sentences in Cantonese at Sophie in which she confusingly replied to her “what do you want me to say!?” which made me giggle

• Writing a wish on a leaf, tying it to an orange and then trying to throw it on a tree – all in the name of Chinese New Year. If the orange lands on the tree it is said to bring you good fortune for the new year… only my friend Karmen missed the tree… then got her orange taken away by a little child… (no fortune for you Karmen) 😉

• Not heading to Macau because it was too busy, so instead we made a small detour to a remote village, only to be growled at by angry dogs. Me and Sandy led the pack (of humans), only to be barked at by the pack (of dogs) and the stand off ended abruptly with Sandy being startled and me running away

• Heading to Australian Diary Co for breakfast, only for it to be closed and we had to hike up a small hill to our next breakfast destination. On the same day we went to eat dimsum, but the first restaurant was closed, the second was fully booked and the last restaurant had forgotten that we had ordered food so we sat confused in the restaurant for a good 20 minutes

• Wanting to contact home, but the wifi going down in the hostel (which meant we actually had to talk to each other), so we ended up coming up with the following bucketlist:

• Don’t die
• Connect to wifi in every place
• Buy cheap things
• Hug a cat
• Try all biscuits

You could obviously tell we were lost without wifi… however without wifi we ended up playing a few card games and getting to know each other way better which was a pleasant experience before our time in Ningbo together.

I’m currently in Ningbo and it’s been full of activities and new people, but I will update you guys in a future blog. For now I’ll leave you with a glimpse of our Hong Kong trip.

Ciao for now! 🙂

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