Last week my hall had to turn off the water supply for 12 hours because the building had to clean the water tank so my roommate and I took this chance to head to Hong Kong Island. My roommate is also from the States, and also happens to be an American born Chinese (also known as an ABC), but she doesn’t speak Cantonese or Mandarin so I do become her personal translator at times. We decided to visit her grandparents’ place that weekend and use the time to explore Hong Kong Island. Hong Kong Island isn’t necessarily far from HKBU, it’s roughly a 40-50 minute train ride, but it requires two transfers.
Her grandparents live in Sheung Wan District of Hong Kong Island and the moment I stepped out of the station, I already saw the differences between Kowloon Tong (the district HKBU is in) and Hong Kong Island. The first thing I noticed was the amount of foreigners in the area. Aside from other exchange students, I don’t see a lot of foreigners in Kowloon Tong, and I don’t think I ever saw one in New Territories. But it does make sense why there are a lot of people of color on Hong Kong Island because the majority of expats that are sent to Hong Kong for work, work for the financial firms that are located in Hong Kong Island. Another thing that I noticed immediately were the buildings. On the Island, it had a better mix of Eastern and Western styled buildings, while on the Kowloon side, you see less Western styled buildings (but that is it beginning to change).
After we dropped off our stuff at her grandparents’ place we headed towards Causeway Bay, the main attraction of the Island. Similar to Mongkok, Causeway Bay is another famous shopping district and houses Hong Kong’s version of New York City’s Times Square. Though our goal that day wasn’t shopping, but instead, finding a Cat Café.
I have always wanted to visit a cat café after reading about it on online years ago, and cat cafes are more popular in South Korea and also Japan, but after researching online I found out Hong Kong had one also! In my last blog post I mentioned that some businesses are open on residential floors, and this cat café is one of them. It was quite easy to find the apartment building itself, but trying to get into the building was another problem. Luckily a lot of people were entering and leaving the building so we were able to get into the building without a problem (the security guard didn’t even question us).
The experience at the café was really interesting, a lot of people thought that the cats would start attacking you for food, but they honestly could care less! The cats were really friendly and would walk around minding their own business. The food at the café is sanitary because it was made in the kitchen where the cats are not allowed to enter. The only way I can explain the experience is that it’s just like having dinner at home with a lot of cats in the house.
