Sunday 13th May

My alarm went off at 4.30am this morning and I had to force myself to actually get out of bed! I had a quick shower and did some last minute packing and I was ready just in time for my driver to pick me up at 5.30am.

Now, in the words of one of my grade 1 kids “I tell you, ok” about my driver, Mr Wang. Mr Wang is a black taxi driver in our area and is the happiest man you will ever meet. He speaks a little bit of English but he is always so friendly. I have booked him for full days every weekend for about a month now, and when Matt was over we used him for three days in a row picking us up at about 8am, driving us around all day and taking us home for about 6pm and he was charging us really cheap prices. If I need a taxi anywhere I will always call Mr Wang first and if he is free he will always pick me up and take me where I want to go and he always looks really pleased to see me. Raena also uses him a lot and I think we are his most loyal customers.

Anyway, Mr Wang picked me up at 5.30am and asked if I wanted to go anywhere for breakfast on the way to the airport (how many taxi drivers do you know that would offer to do that without you having to ask them?) I said no and he took me to the airport and I got breakfast there while I waited for my flight to Shenzen. Now the school had booked my flights and instead of booking a direct flight to Hong Kong which would take 3 hours, they booked the cheaper version of a flight to Shenzen in the very south of China and I had to get a bus the rest of the way. I have never done it this way before and didn’t have a clue where to go or anything, I had just been told to ask someone when I got there where to go and to buy a ticket.

Now I hate flying, or travelling for any long periods of time. I get travel sick, I get bored and I hate being sat still in cramped spaces for long. The flight was boarding on time and I got on the plane, got settled and then we sat there on the runway for another 55 minutes with no explanation. Someone had bad gas on the flight so that wasn’t very pleasant and the flight was 3 hours long. I landed in Shenzen and asked where to go and was pointed to a desk where I bought my bus ticket to Hong Kong. The bus really surprised me as it was actually a coach, there was lots of leg room and it had air conditioning! Considering how much I had been dreading this journey it was turning out to be a lot better than I had been expecting. We drove for about 20 minutes and we got to immigration. We had to get off the coach and take everything with us and go through immigration. On the other side the luxury coach was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t have a clue where I was supposed to be going and no one spoke English so I just went along the long line of coaches showing my ticket until one of them ushered me on. This is where my day started to go downhill. This was exactly what i had been expecting when I had been told I would be travelling by bus for 2 hours to Hong Kong. It was a city bus, not a coach, which was crammed with people. There was barely any leg room and I am quite short, there was no air conditioning and it stank. It was 33 degrees and I was melting, to make it worse, the smelly man next to me was hocking and spitting the whole way there which was disgusting. For 2 whole hours!

Thankfully Kowloon was the first stop so I jumped off the bus and went in search of a taxi. I took a taxi to my hostel on Nathan road (a very low budget hostel as a lot had been booked up at such short notice) If I had thought the entrance to my last hostel  in Hong Kong was a dive, this was far worse! I got to reception and the lady shows me to my room which was supposed to be a double room but was actually a single room and the air conditioning didn't work. I complained and after huffing and puffing about it the lady agreed to move me to a different room. The new room was supposed to be for three people as there was a double and a single bed in there, but it was such a small room the lady couldn’t fit in it with me and my bag so I would hate to be actually staying with two other people there. Luckily the only bit I cared about was the air conditioning and that worked so that was good, after 10 hours travelling I just wanted to rest. I had a shower and I was sorting out my things when I heard a lot of banging and crashing going on in the room next door, I went to investigate and the rooms next door are like a building site with all the tiles being pulled off the walls and lots of shouting and drilling! I’m hating this hostel already, I knew I should have paid the difference to be put up in a hotel!

I went out for dinner and found an Italian restaurant around the corner which was quite nice, then came back to the hostel at 7pm to Google the visa office and work out how I was going to get there in the morning.