Hong Kong Day 3

Saturday, 22 December 2018

Today I navigated the MTR (train) system like a boss and shaved a third off my travel time to Olympic House.  I had plenty of time to take a few photos on the way.

I joked to Clare before I left that I would have the luxury having the best English skills, and the 2nd best Norwegian skills in the training room (I'm doing an IOF Event Advisers Course).  I'm not sure I'd bet my life on the former as there were some pretty good English speakers, but I was right about the latter - the course is being taught by a Norwegian, who happens to be a longtime friend of my Norwegian family. In any case I was definitely the only student who was being taught in my native tongue.

Afterwards we had the standard training course lunch..

Ok maybe not quite so standard. It was pretty good anyway - very chinese of course but today had more vegetarian options than yesterday which was good!    I don't think I've eaten authentic chinese since I left the ABC - we used to go to Chatswood quite frequently for Yum Cha. To tell the truth it's not my favourite cuisine, but today was pretty good.  

Then once we were all dismissed I ambled my way back to the train station, doing a bit of shopping in all my usual stores on the way..

Ok. Maybe not those shops but I did have a quick shop in The Gap and Uniglo.   Just like the MTR, all the stores were packed, I only lasted a little while before I had to get back out to the street!

Then I hopped back onto the MTR and travelled 'home'. When I exited the underground I was amazed that the street had changed again - it was suddenly packed with markets and the streets which had traffic the day before were now  packed with people instead. It was like a completely different street!

As it turned out, it was a completely different street and I'd exited the station in a different place.  After a few minutes of confusion I fixed my mistake and walked back up to the hostel. It's finally starting to look like there is an orienteering event on as the teams from Asian nations are arriving.

 I'm just running the sprint event tomorrow then heading straight to the airport so I can be home on Christmas Eve.  The Asian Championships involves a sprint, middle distance and a relay so most competitors are staying here until the 27th of December.

Before collapsing in my room I climbed up the hill behind the hostel to get a view of Kowloon.  The roof of the hostel is the building at the bottom right of the above picture.   I could see the water, but the photos don't show it.

This blog post has taken a while, so I'm going to finish up and go and get some dinner  - hopefully it won't be as busy as last night - there were long queues outside every one of the billion or so food places, so I eventually gave up and bought some cereal and milk from the supermarket!