Winter Break 2016: China and Hong Kong

For this year's winter break, as soon as I finished up with my English camp, I flew off to China for a short, 5 day vacation. I flew into Beijing from Korea on Saturday afternoon and met my mom at the airport. I was so happy she agreed to visit me and take this trip together.

Lucky Family Hostel
During our time in Beijing, we stayed at Lucky Family Hostel. Normally, to be allowed entrance into China, you need to have applied for and paid for a visa ahead of time (and they're pretty expensive), but - there's a loophole! China has a policy, in order to accommodate people with long layovers, that allows "in transit" citizens from certain countries (USA included) to stay in the country for 72 hours without a visa. This means that you have to fly into China from another country, and then show your ticket proving that you'll be flying out again, within 72 hours, to a different country. Thankfully, China counts Hong Kong as a "different" country. So with a quick search of the cheapest tickets we could find from Korea to Beijing to Hong Kong and back to Korea, we were on our way!

The Great Wall of China - Jinshanling
The first full day we spent in Beijing, we took a day trip to see a remote section of the Great Wall. This is was one of my top 3 for places I most wanted to see in the entire world, so I was super stoked about it.
The Meridian Gate, to the Forbidden City
The second day in Beijing, we would be flying out in late evening, but we spent the morning and early afternoon exploring the city. We got to see the outside of the Forbidden City and walk around Tiananmen Square first. Then we took a long stroll through the Temple of Heaven complex.

The Temple of Heaven
We flew into Hong Kong at nearly midnight on our third day and rested up for a full 4th day of walking around the beautiful cities endless markets. Then we took a tram ride to the top of the famous peak to get a hazy view of the city from above.

Hong Kong from Victoria Peak
Location: China

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Korean Baseball Games

Image
Now that spring is here, one of the fantastic must-have experiences in Korea was a baseball game. And, wow, are they exciting! It's nothing like baseball games I've been to in America. First off, you're allowed to bring in whatever kind of beer and food you want - no having to settle for gross and ridiculously overpriced beer! Secondly is the ambiance. Each side has one of these stages with several dancers and an announcer. The home team gets to advertise theirs on the big screen, but each team is equally loud. They cheer and sing and dance through almost the ENTIRE game. When your team is up to bat, the whole crowd (on that side that is rooting for them) stands and chants, sings and does hand motions all lead by the announcer and the dancers. In this particular game our team, the LG Twins, was losing by quite a bit. But even in the last inning, no one failed to cheer their hearts out at the top of their lungs. If anything, they cheered LOUDER because we were l
Read more

A Korean Wedding

Image
Two weeks before the event itself, the landlord of my apartment (whom I know very well and am friendly with) messaged me to invite my neighbor and I to his son's wedding! This surprising method of invitation was the first of many things I would learn about Korean weddings. Firstly, there are 2 types of weddings: "traditional" and "western". Traditional weddings are extremely rare, barely anyone opts to have them anymore, but many of its little practices still show through in the Korean interpretation of the "western" wedding. This is the wedding hall in which I attended the wedding. As you can see, it's very showy. The center aisle and the front area is actually a stage. These giant halls are rented for just the ceremony. A business or building that runs them usually has several and on a given day (especially Saturdays), there are usually many weddings going on at the same time, and 3-4 lined up in the same event hall for the same day, get
Read more

Seoul Trick Eye Museum

Image
Our last day in Seoul for the long May weekend, we went to a couple places. The first, located in Hongdae, was the Trick Eye Museum. It's an amazingly fun place set up purely to take funny and awesome photographs due to the optical illusions painted in the space. Each work is accompanied by instructions and an example photo to show you how to take the best picture illusion. Here are some of the ones we took that worked out the best.   In addition to our purchase of a ticket to the Trick Eye Museum, we received a complementary admission to the ice museum next door. This place was smaller, but it was fun, too. It was SO COLD inside though (obviously it needed to be).
Read more