Out of the country

We went on a very brief trip to Macau (the other SAR) today, a one hour ride on the Turbojet ferry (a high speed catamaran with Boeing jet engines strapped to the back) .
Macau's a funny place - very obviously Portuguese with the cobbled streets, cafes, scooters and Catholic churches, and very obviously Chinese too - shrines, incense, antiques and pawn shops.
It was our second time there, so we didn't do too much this time. After getting the bus into the old town, we managed to find a well-known cafe (Margarets cafe e nata) which is tucked away in a back street full of mopeds, and is famous for it's egg tarts.


Full of egg and pastry, we just wandered around the streets surrounding the main square, had a look in a few churches (but not in St Paul's as there's no "in" to look at - only the facade is standing now, which is probably what makes it so famous) and then went up to the museum which is set inside the old fortress. It's a pretty good one, with lots of reconstructions of old buildings, that kind of thing. By the time we'd finished, had lunch and walked around a bit more it was time to get back to our own Special Administrative Region, with just enough time to grab a bottle of Portuguese green wine from the duty free shop before we got the boat back.

Old battery

Today was another public holiday - the Chung Yeung (aka Double Ninth) festival: one of the grave-sweeping festivals and also a day for climbing mountains and wearing chrysanthemums. It's often thought of as the start of the hiking season.

We'd decided to do some walking on the trails around the Peak anyway, so we headed up there by bus in the late-morning. It's a lot less humid now, but today was still hazy and quite hot in the sun. There was some breeze though, so a nice day for walking. From the (very crowded) Peak we headed up Mount Austin Road - a very steep hill leading to some apartment complexes- to meet the Governor's Walk. There were quite a lot of people around there, most of them attempting to fly kites in slightly awkward places (one almost hit a large middle-aged man in shorts, who commented sarcastically in a strong German accent, "nice place to try to fly a kite...not!"). A lot of people were carrying brightly coloured pin-wheels, which perhaps substitute for the chrysanthemums traditionally worn?
From there we managed to find a small, very quiet, stone path which led downwards and eventually met up with the Peak circular path which we walked on back in August. Then we followed another trail to Pinewood Battery.
It's the remains of an old gun-emplacement, which featured quite significantly in WWII, but was actually built quite a long time before to see off feared invasions from Russia or China. It's quite well-preserved with lots of info boards to read, and good views to the south. There were quite a lot of people around there, most of them also of the kite-flying kind.
We'd originally planned to walk down to a bus stop near the university, but felt like doing more so followed the longer route back down to a small reservoir. On the way we had to cross a fearsome looking column of ants:
The great thing about Hong Kong is that after all this walking in what seems like quite wild-countryside, you can suddenly emerge to find a busy road and a wait of only about 3 or 4 minutes for a bus straight back home.

Gifts from above

Last week they cleaned the flat roof that our windows look out onto, and since then we've been getting some reminders that there're about 18 more floors above ours (because of the layout, it feels like we live in a lowrise building): random objects from are starting to appear - so far we have a tea-towel, two clothes pegs (one wood, one plastic) and a whole laundry pole. There will be more - I'll keep you updated...

Long Island

On Monday we went on a short trip to Cheung Chau (meaning "long island") - one of the hundreds of islands that make up Hong Kong proper. Wikipedia can tell you more about it than I ever could, but it's a pleasant place to go to get away from the city for a bit, with some nice beaches, beautiful scenery and interesting, slightly ramshackle, back streets in the main town area. There are also quite a few small temples dotted around the place, all reflecting the past history of Cheung Chau (and Hong Kong as a whole) with gaudy shrines dedicated to gods of the sea.

When we were walking around the south-eastern part of the island, we came across an apparently inhabited house made of junk - scrap metal, old air-conditioners, stoves and anything imaginable:

Long lasting

Last weekend they filled part of the shrine at the top of our street with incense coils - hanging from the ceiling in stacks (you can see others like this many temples around Hong Kong, espescially the Man Mo temple on Hollywood Road) and creating huge wafts of fragrant smoke to fill the narrow steps. They can apparently keep burning for about 2 weeks - after just over a week the ones near us still seem to be going strong:

Ignoring the rules too

Ignoring the rules

Goings on

As part of the mid-autumn festival there have been various festivities going on around Hong Kong. On Friday and Saturday night there was a temporary stage set up in the little shrine which is tucked on to the side of some steps at the top end of our street, featuring a woman belting out what sounded like Chinese classic 80s songs. The audience, mostly shirtless old men but also passing tourists, and local restaurant owners, was sparse but seemed appreciative.

Then there was a huge lantern festival in Victoria Park on Saturday night (plenty of pictures on Flickr) complete with a demonstration of Mongolian throat singing, Cantonese opera, giant moving volcano shaped lanterns...the usual.

Cakes of the moon

The mid-autumn festival (in American English "mid-fall festival", but doesn't sound like something one would really want to celebrate...) is upon us, and so are mooncakes, the traditional and ubiquitous Chinese snacks. These days there are many newfangled types - even Starbucks and Haagen Dazs have got in on the act - but the more typical ones look a bit like a good old pork pie, complete with an egg-yolk or two inside (to represent the full-moon), but with lotus seed or sweet bean paste filling in place of meat. Anyway, Wikipedia can tell you more that I ever could, but suffice it to say that they are usually very very rich and heavy. This one was enough for the two of us.

OK, OK

Certain people have been nagging for pictures - have a look at my Hong Kong set on Flickr - the first 5 were taken locally.
And as it's a nice morning, I took one out of our kitchen window (note the bamboo scaffolding - cheap, light, fast to build, and ever-so-slightly dangerous):

Moved

So we moved OK on Saturday, and had our broadband connected on Sunday afternoon, thanks to some good pulling-strings work by our agent. The move went fine despite a heavy downpour, a large anti-communist party rally and our man-with-a-van Ken being in an accident in the cross-harbour tunnel. He sent one of his friends, Danny, to help us instead.

We got everything packed away over the weekend (the storage in our new place is really good - it just seemed to absorb all 7 boxes of our stuff without a problem) and had plenty of time to look around our area and get used to the new sounds of our building. There's a singing-girl at the end of the corridor: an 8 year old who always leaves and returns skipping and singing. Our immediate neighbours seem to be incessantly playing mahjong (apparently mahjongg, mah-jong and mah-jongg are also acceptable); we can hear the racket of the tiles being mixed, and then clicked onto the table long into the night. Still, it's been a holiday weekend so maybe they'll return to a normal routine from now on.