China is AMAZING – I can’t really think of any better word to express our experiences of the past couple of weeks.
We left England just two weeks ago, but the UK already seems like a lifetime away. We have done so much and progressed well here in such a short time. Yet we still feel we are at the bottom of what will prove to be another of life’s very steep learning curves.
We flew from London directly to Hong Kong, landing in the early evening, and breezed through customs and immigration. We found the bus we needed from the info provided by the little hotel we had booked for a couple of nights. The hotel itself was a little harder to find, and involved negotiating a barrage of other accomodation offers on a packed and busy sidewalk.
Once settled in we headed out to explore the huge, bright and busy city. The skyline is lit with millions of watts of neon, and the ferry accross the harbour offers great views at a bargain price of around 20p (30 cents).
The next day we achieved our Hong Kong goal by buying a lovely new Lenovo laptop. My old Acer, bought back in 2009, is struggling a bit now, and the fan sounds like it might give up at any second, so we thought it might be a good time to replace it in a city famed for cheaper prices for electronics.
After a second night in our tiny but comfortable Hong Kong hotel room we headed for the ferry terminal, just across the harbour from our hotel. We caught a 50 minute ferry to China, where we landed at Shekou Port, a south-western suburb of the enormous city of Shenzhen.
Once again we breezed through customs and immigration with the slightest of formality, our business visas giving us entry for three months, with a second three months available after that if we skip across to Hong Kong and then return.
Our hotel was only a ten minute walk from the port, and with bags dropped off we headed out to discover something of the new city we plan to call home for the foreseeable future.