I blog when I go abroad, and occasionally when I do stuff in the UK too. There's a nicer interface over here.

Friday, October 06, 2006

Missing out Singapore for the moment..

Just arrived in Hong Kong for a one night stay before flying to Tokyo in the morning. Some things I forgot to comment on about Hong Kong from first time round, primarily to do with money. First, when waiting for the ferry to central on Monday I was really thirsty but fresh out of cash. Octopus card to the rescue, the vending machines accept it as a form of payment. Diet Coke ahoy. Secondly, Hong Kong ATMs have their 0-9 keypad in a different order to every ATM I've ever used in every other country ever. Finally, the money is branded. Notes of the same denomination are all the same size, but different designs and colours depending on the issuing bank. I was very confused to get 4 different HKD20 notes in the change from my first ever HK purchase.

So now I'm here again and I just did the least fatcat bit of the holiday yet. I checked my bag in at Singapore all the way to Tokyo so I've just got hand luggage at the moment, just one bag because I didn't need to buy a new one after all. Because of that, and because when getting off the flight I was a bit drunk, I thought I'd get a regular local public transport (ie, non-hotel-shuttle) bus from the airport to this hotel. It's just off airport island and easily visible, and I thought the S1 bus went right outside it.

It doesn't. It goes to Tung Chung subway station. Which is supposedly OK, because I read my hotel (Novotel Citygate) has direct access to that station. Unfortunately when I got there it appeared quite vividly that the hotel was across and uncrossable road and I couldn't find any signs. But then I did! So I followed it, and the next sign was greyed out. OK, I figured, busted light, I'll follow it anyway. Then the next one was greyed out too. And the next one. But I perservered and here I am, in my hotel. After public transport and a walk through a shopping centre I checked in and got upgraded to a room on the top floor, one of the business floors, and it is swish. I think the bottle of wine just over there is free, shame I don't drink the damn stuff. I have a fairly good view, cordless phone + aircon control, the widest range of free toiletries yet, and am just generally a bit... annoyed that the only room upgrade has occurred in a hotel I'll be staying in for less than 12 hours. 0730 shuttle bus to the airport tomorrow morning, would normally have gone a bit later but (a) I want to go drink some more (b) I'm already checked in -- with an upper deck seat, no less -- for the flight to Narita.

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