Having gone home in November for my birthday, I knew going home for Christmas wasn’t going to be an option, so I decided to go to Hong Kong for a long weekend because, well, why not? And then my cousin decided she’d like to come over to my neck of the woods and join me for the trip and then come play in Tokyo for a while afterwards. Nine days in all. And we had so much fun.

View from our hotel room – it wasn’t super clear that first day, but you can see the other side of the bay if you look carefully.

Hong Kong is an amazing city. As this assignment in Japan is the first time I’ve been to Asia, all of it is new to me. I had heard good things about Hong Kong and with it being a short four hour flight from Tokyo, it’s an easy long-weekend destination.

Loved these super cute little trams going along the bay.

We had lunch at a restaurant on Victoria Peak that was all decked out for Christmas and had an amazing view!

After lunch we went for a walk/hike up to the very top of the peak and wandered through the gardens. It was so pretty…but I was not wearing the best shoes for it. Totally rookie mistake.

And then we took in the views. Such a beautiful city!

Thankfully, one of my former bosses gave me some great recommendations about where to stay. Of course, her top picks for hotels were a little outside of my budget, but I was able to get in the same neighborhood and I’m so glad I did. We were staying in a great location, as I would discover.

There’s something about peaks and hearts in Asia. Here, Seoul…

With as busy as I’d been at work leading up to the trip, I hadn’t had a lot of time to plan out what we were going to do, so other than a hotel and a couple of restaurant reservations, we were just going with the flow.

The Christmas theme was going on everywhere – including inside the tower on Victoria Peak where we got to listen to a high school band/orchestra play Christmas songs.

So, we spent our first day up on Victoria Peak and wandering through the city checking things out. For those of you who may go to Hong Kong in the future, I got some great advice from one of my friends before going…to take the bus up to the peak and the tram back down (most people just take the tram both ways); the reason being that you get to see so much more from the bus and it is SO CHEAP! It takes a little longer but it’s totally worth it.

I wish you could tell how steep it was on the way down from this photo because it was steep.

The Governor’s Mansion

Hong Kong is super hilly–like San Francisco hilly–and one of the things they’ve done to help people in terms of transportation is to install these escalators that take its riders up or down the side of the mountain (depending on the time of day, they change directions). Seriously, they are pretty incredible. Which is why I took a bunch of photos.

My super cute cousin posing for the camera

To be continued…