Tadaima~! Got back from Hong Kong on Thursday night and I'm missing all the food and atmosphere from there already. Not the first time, though. You can go out to eat anything of your choice much cheaper than here and there's just so much more variety. Then there's always lots of people walking around no matter what time it is too.

Public transport is also much cleaner, convenient an you won't catch people smoking on the upper deck of buses - something you can't avoid here without sticking to the lower deck. There's an underground station nearly everywhere and with an Octopus card, you don't have to rummage for change on almost any transport.

Don't expect any pictures of the tourist spots because I didn't go to any this time round. I've been to HK so many times that I don't bother with those places anymore =P

The flight to HK was alright. I was sitting in the middle seat with two people - one a girl who slept for the entire flight from take-off to landing. Well, almost... She woke up for the last meal then played with her DS for a while. Other person was a friendly middle aged man from Amsterdam (I was on the KLM flight). I didn't converse with them much though because I was busy playing away at DJMax Portable using the random song mode and also Ridge Racer 2.

HK is known for a lot of cheap electronics and other things so, what goodies did I pick up while in HK? I bought a whole bundle of stuff but I'm not going to list them all.

First there's a number of Doraemon movies on DVD which I haven't seen before (yes, I grew up watching the show and I still like it!). Very hard to find for download and I guess it's because not enough people are interested on the Net =P

No idea why they decided to revert the Cantonese name from "Ding Dong" back to "Doraemon"... Did the Japanese producers complain about or something?

While in HK, there was a computer fair at Sham Shui Po for a few days and memory cards were going at super cheap prices. I went along to see what goodies were there hoping to pick up a bigger (and cheap) PSP memory card. Naturally, the place was packed and you could hardly move around of course. I found myself a 4GB Sandisk memory card for £40 (about half the usual price) and a 3600mAh PSP battery for £5. Great bargain for the battery! Lasts around 10 hours compared to the 4 or 5 hours of the original battery.

Next there's the Nohohon Zoku figure that sits on your desk, swaying its head from side to side and powered by a small solar panel. It's just very soothing to look at so I couldn't help buying it XD

The "Gin-iro no Kami no Agito" DVDs also caught my eye when I saw Hayao Miyazaki's name on it since I'm a fan of his Ghibli works. Turns out it was a student of his who done this movie and when I looked up reviews for it it seems it has a very much borrowed story. But whatever, I thought I would pick it up and watch the Gonzo animation anyway and see for myself!

Also bought Gundam Battle Royale for half the price it's going for on import game sites like Yesasia and Play-asia. Very good action game.

All the PSP/DS games I saw in the stores were all going for half the price listed on those sites really so if you ever drop by HK be sure to pick up some cheap import games ;)

Trip back wasn't so great with two guys kicking the back of my chair now and then. Luckily it wasn't too frequent... You would think people would know how to act at this age but there you go.

The plane was a little less packed compared to the flight to HK so you had quite a few empty seats about the place. I only had one person sitting next to me and others were putting their feet up on the spare seats.

I had to switch flights at Amsterdam as before but this time I had to sit for 3 hours at the airport instead of one. For some reason, there's always lots of Japanese tourists here in groups. Tried connecting to the Wi-Fi network there with my PSP and it worked but you had to register a free account with the airport first so I didn't bother with it. I could browse freely back at the Glasgow airport.

Spent the time playing Ouendan instead since I already wasted away my new PSP battery on the 12 hour flight earlier. The airport was just completely quiet with hardly anyone around.

Well, now that I'm back home with my broadband connection I can catch up with all the Anime I've missed and (try) posting up translated gaming news again. Can't wait for all those new big releases for this year!

A cool little robot on display in the HK airport.

No liquids unless you buy the specially packed ones at the airport.

Yup, hardly anyone around in the evening.