Taormina e prima...

Ciao a tutti da Taormina in Sicilia!!

No, don’t worry, Im not going to write this entire blog in Italiano...I wish!! Haha
Yes, I did make it here to my final destination (for now), but before I tell you all about my new home and getting here, we should start at the beginning...

Hong Kong

Well what can I say... Humid, busy, crowded, different, impressive, crazy, tiring, never ending...I could go on and on, as it does as a city!!

I arrived at a very civilised hour on Monday afternoon and wound my way through busy streets and freeways on the bus to find my hostel which was like a small oasis tucked away up high from the action of the city, but a small one at that. This seems to be the case for the rest of the residences in this crowded city also...up high and packed in like sardines. Every square centimetre of this city is being used in one way or the other, or maybe even in ten ways.

I was staying on level 11 of the second building along on the right side of the road. This is the main East-West road on Hong Kong island that the trams run along...and no, I didn’t know that Hong Kong had trams either until I got there. They are double-decker too!!

The night before I flew out of Melbourne my beautiful new laptop wasn’t being so beautiful and decided to stop connecting to wireless internet, so I spent 5 hours of my first day in HK on the phone in my hostel, to a guy in the HK HP computer call centre.


Here I am sitting on my bottom bunk at the hostel looking very unimpressed whilst attempting to complete the fix that my friend at the call centre, David Wong, gave me.

When I finally made it out that afternoon to have a look around, I caught “Peak Tram” up the steep grade of the main hill in HK to “The Peak” funnily enough!! haha. There were great views of the city from up there.

By now, you might have noticed that all of my photos of HK are in black and white and yes there is a reason for this. I decided that since there is so much action, colour and chaos in HK that black and white photos would simplify all that was captured... just the visual communicator in me I guess.

I then headed to a night market and of course despite already having a VERY full pack and still needing to get to Italy, I was persuaded to buy a few things...yes, they twisted my arm!! Haha

I had dinner at a small restaurant here that was well and truelly spilling out onto the streets of the market and was a buzz with market goers stopping for food. I was plonked on the end of a long communal table and had a great view of all that everyone else was eating.

Day 2 I was excited by a full day of sightseeing after my limited day out the day before. Whilst on the plane there I had been reading the Cathay Pacific mag and it talked about “cafes” that are well known and loved by locals and what they are know for. One that served chicken pies (Gai Pai) that regularly sell out as soon as they are out of the oven at 12pm, caught my eye. So I went on an adventure looking for it and obtained one of these pies for myself.

It was a very interesting experience, to say the least. It was about the size of a Christmas fruit mince pie and was still hot from the oven. The filling was just like a regular chicken pie with bits of chicken and a sort of gravy, BUT it was surrounded by a very short, sweet, buttery pastry that was quite thick...VERY interesting!! This kind of sweet and savoury combo seemed to be very common.

After this short fuel stop I headed to the fantastic HK Park on a whim and found a magnificent space with a Tai Chi garden (with tower within that had great views across the park), free Conservatory and enclosed aviary, lakes with turtles and Olympic amphitheatre. Generally it was a very nice and well designed space.


Next stop, the gold fish market...yes they have a street with nearly all shops basically dedicated soley to gold fish and keeping them. I guess they are easy pets for the tightly packed HK residents.

There were lots and lots of walls like these with fish in bags...poor fishies!! L

Then another market, The Ladies Market before heading back to the hostel for a break and to pack my bags for an extremely early get away to the airport the next morning for my long haul to Rome via London for 4 hours.


Dinner was a quick bowl of fish ball and sliced pork congee, a plate of chinese broccoli and oyster sauce and an iced tea at Congee Wonderland (I hadn’t tried congee before and so was intreagued by it) before going to see the evening lightshow on the city buildings from the edge of the bay. I only caught the end of the light show and then headed back to bed.


I was then up at 3:45am the next day to get a cab and then the night bus to get to the airport for my 7:35am flight to London and then onto Rome.

Jo xox