Shenzhen and crossing the Chinese Border
Had a wonderful last day in Hong Kong. One of the interesting aspects of this trip is that my wife is on a business trip around China (hence the inspiration for my trip) and her itinerary continually interweaves with mine. What that meant was that she and her PhD advisor met up with me for lunch at the City Hall Maxim for some great Dim Sum. It’s like an Ala Carte that is actually on a cart, each woman hawking her various dishes to you.
We then wandered SoHo through the food and curio markets before I had to run to do some last minute errands and figure out how to get up to Shenzhen.
The errands essentially involved dealing with the fact that it is 4 days into my trip and I still haven’t received my luggage. Not sure when it will actually catch up to me now, so I picked up another bag and some socks. While you can laugh at the silliness that accompanies travel, it’s also not always fun to deal with packing logistics on the actual trip.
Shenzen
I discovered that flying out of Shenzen, the city just inside the actual Chinese border - whereas Hong Kong is a SAR (not SARS) - is much cheaper for flying within China. How to get to Shenzen is a point of much confusion. There are a lot of signs and offers for the bus or services to get to the local Hong Kong airport - and Lonely Planet keeps mentioning it, but their information is slightly conflicting. Luckily the locals are very helpful and pointed me - albeit after much running about - to the MTR, or subway system, that would take me to the border.
The border itself is like any international border, which is interesting considering that Hong Kong is becoming part of China proper.
Arriving within China itself was a night and day change - literally. It was daytime on one side, then night when I exited 
but there is also an large cultural shift. There is little to no English on signs, and the ‘design’ of everything has a different aesthetic, from billboards to shop layouts.
There is a harried tale of actually getting from Shenzen, to the airport, to Guilin that I’ll leave for another post or day - I’m still figuring it all out in my head. As a teaser, it involves ATMS distributing funny money, sketchy taxis and chinese roads.