C&S Meet C&C for Hong Kong Intensive

Sunday, May 17, 2009

I’m on the plane from Hong Kong to Denpasar (it is now Monday) which is almost a five hour flight, so I have lots of time to write about the fun day we had yesterday running around Hong Kong with Cliff & Cathy. They must have brought good weather from LA with them because we woke up to another sunny (and very hot and humid) day. We met at 10am to take the tram to the top of Victoria Peak to see spectacular views of Hong Kong, Kowloon and the harbor. The top of Victoria Peak has possibly the worst collection of tourist shops ever, but we found one selling fans and bought several because this is a must-have item in this part of the world.

(A note about Hong Kong and I think SE Asia in general – you just have to get used to being soaking wet all the time. The heat and the humidity are so strong that your clothes are completely soaked after ½ hour. For the first few hours you’re miserable, then eventually you just give in to it. And at some point you stop noticing it.)

Next, Cathy had read in her Wallpaper Guidebook about a shop called G.O.D. (Goods of Desire) located an area near Wan Chai. We thought that sounded fun so we hopped in a cab. G.O.D. turned out to be adorable and aptly named. It’s a contemporary Chinese design shop with an irreverent flair. Our biggest problem was the fact that they don’t ship to America. We could have filled an entire container with large items like modern design furniture or stow-away futons or small items like toucan can openers, sheets printed with images of Chinese apartment buildings or newspapers, pillows with morphed combo images of Obama’s and Lincoln’s faces – oh well, I guess you had to be there. The shop didn’t allow photographs or I would have taken many.

Shopping worked up our appetite for lunch and, again thanks to C&C’s research, we taxied over to a huge luxury shopping complex near the Four Seasons Hotel and took several escalators up to find a dim-sum restaurant called Lei Gardens. Our verdict: very highly recommended. I’m trying to remember what we ate but can’t other than several types of dumplings (port, shrimp, crab). The system was that you circle what you want to order on a piece of paper (and we probably ordered about 10 dishes total), which the waitress takes away, so during the meal you have no idea what you’re eating. The bottom line is that each dish was absolutely delicious. It was also a lovely restaurant; C&C were seated in front of a display of orchid blossoms, each blossom individually placed into it’s own glass container of water suspended from bamboo.

A comment about the general temperament of Hong Kong this visit. We’ve been struck by how calm, orderly and efficient everything is here. All instructions are clearly marked (tourist directions, etc.). People move about in a reasonably orderly way on the street (which is remarkable for China) and we had no issues with lack of personal space. Cars seem to obey traffic laws and speed limits. There are no crazy lane-changers and horn honkers. In fact there is no horn honking at all! New York, take a lesson from HK.

Taxis in HK are the best deal in town. A ride that in New York would cost 7 or 8 dollars costs about 3.50. During one of our civilized taxi rides we looked at the next lane and went crazy laughing. There were two people and a dog riding a motorcycle, and the dog was decked out with doggie goggles! Our taxi driver sped up so we could take pictures and the motorcycle riders happily posed their dog.

After lunch we walked the short distance from Lei Garden to the Star Ferry Terminal and look the ferry back to Tsim Tsau Tsui. We made a stop at the Peninsula Hotel (as close to heaven as you’ll get on earth aside from the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok) so I could complete my shopping mission (yes Eze I found a sweater!) to return to the best cashmere shop ever, Monte Kashmir, in the hotel arcade. And then, as if all this wasn’t enough for our first day on the ground, we decided to hop on a double-decker bus to tour the neighborhoods of Kowloon. This may have been a bit too much for us to bite off. Scott and I didn’t make it to all the sights. We opted to return to the hotel a bit early – Scott headed off to the pool and me to air conditioning.

But wait, our day isn’t over yet. Next, we met Cliff & Cathy for dinner at 7:30 at Hutong (1 Peiking Road) which turned out to be only ½ block from our hotel. When we arrived, C&C had already secured a primo table by the window so we were ideally positioned to watch the 8pm light show on the buildings of Hong Kong from our 28th floor vantage point on the Kowloon side. The light show is quite spectacular and, as Cliff described it, a bit “trippy”. Each of the skyscrapers is edged with different colored lights and some have green laser beams that shoot out from the top. This display goes on for about 10 minutes and we hardly noticed the arrival of our food because we were so transfixed. The restaurant was dark and dimly lit by candlelight, and there were Chinese birdcages hanging overhead. We ordered fish with black bean and chili, soft-shell crabs with chili, and shrimp with chili. Hum…is there a common denominator here? First the mild fish was served, then the shrimp, and last the soft-shell crab. The crab was presented in a huge red lacquer basket filled with so many red peppers that we couldn’t even see the crab. Thanks to Cliff’s powers of deduction we determined that there had to be at least 300 peppers in the basket. Astonishing.

We collapsed into bed around 10. Scott was asleep in 4 seconds. I counted.