Undisputed monarch

The QE2 is here, docked proudly in the harbour. I went across on the Star Ferry to see her:

She leaves at 11.00 tonight, not to return for quite a while.

Eatery

On Sunday we had lunch at Tsui Wah in Central, one of a chain of restaurants. The style of this chain is ... eclectic. This is the kind of brightly lit, permanently bustling Hong Kong restaurant that has a very cheap but extensive menu, covering nostalgic Chinese favourites, 'Western' dishes (including roasts and spaghetti), Japanese noodles, and instant macaroni and noodles. I had baked Portuguese chicken with rice, accompanied with iced coffee (made with Carnation I'm sure); Christine sampled the fried noodles with pork and bean sprouts, and hot lemon tea.

The decor is 80s roller-disco meets American family restaurant; the service is harried and slightly surly, in the best Cantonese tradition; the hot tea brought to the tables is used for rinsing chopsticks and cutlery, not drinking; leftovers are scraped into large plastic buckets hauled around by brash women wearing marigolds; tables often become communal; orders are frequently mixed up. But, it's all very good-humoured, with a varied clientele (dressed-up young women, old couples, families, shady businessmen and the occasional Japanese tourist), and the food is quite tasty and good value for money.

Just some updates

It's still chilly here, and sort of drizzly too. I had a work seminar yesterday,at which I spoke for 10 minutes. That was the biggest ever audience I've spoken to - about 300 teachers, plus probably 30 or so colleagues - in a large and quite fancy ballroom at the Kowloon Shangri-la hotel. It was a good experience, and quite enjoyable. Clip-on radio microphone and all.

The QE2's stopping over in Hong Kong for 2 days - arriving tomorrow morning. Hopefully we'll have a better luck seeing her than we did the QM2 a couple of weeks ago.

Cold weather virus

Another cold snap in the last couple of days, accompanied with lots of weather warnings and advice. Such sentences as 'If you must go out, ensure you wear adequate clothing ...' And this is for a low of about 11 or 12 degrees C!

The Queen Mary 2 was in Hong Kong last week. She only stayed for 24 hours, and we hoped to get a glimpse of her as she left in the evening. Unfortunately, being so big, she couldn't dock in the usual spot in Victoria Harbour but had to be parked in some bleak container terminal, much to the disgust of many of the passengers. Thinking that the ship would be bound to leave via the spectacular harbour we waited around by the harbourside until well after the scheduled departure time of 7.00 p.m. but to no avail ... the next day we read that she in fact did come through the harbour at 8.00 (well, just after due to some late passengers) to see the nightly light-show. Oh well. The QE2's here next week for a couple of days, so perhaps we'll have better luck seeing her. Anyway, hanging around by the Central ferry piers gave us a good chance to try out the Beer Bay - a really cheap kiosk selling some decent bottled beers and a couple of decent ones on draft too (in plastic glasses but that makes it better somehow). I noticed they had pasties too!

I'm home a bit early today as I couldn't get much more done at work - a virus (trojan horse to be pedantic) had spread around our network during the day meaning we all had to physically disconnect and have our machines individually seen to ... they still hadn't got to mine when I decided to call it a day.

Saturday

It's a really nice sunny day here today, and it's Saturday! Yee-har. I'm stuck in at the moment waiting for a package to be redelivered. Still, I'm making the most of the time, catching up with some stuff I needed to do on the web: aliental.com has a new (but still temporary) page now, and I've cleaned up some parts of my web site a little bit. I still need to do a lot more, not to mention getting a decent design sorted out for this blog.

Again, I'm sorry about the extended break from blogging. During that time we did quite a bit of eating out, and exploring some new places around Hong Kong island. Oh yes, and Rob visited for a week or so, which was really good. We went to Ocean Park on a Sunday afternoon, went up to the Peak (using the Peak Tram which we hadn't done for ages), that kind of thing. Soon after that, we decided to go out for a short walk, and walk up the path next to the Peak Tramway a little bit ... anyway, we ended up walking all the way up to the Peak. It didn't take as long as we thought it would - it always seems like an impossible thing to do - and it gave us a sense of achievement suddenly emerging from the woods into the bustling area around the top tram-station.

I think I'll fill you in a few other things from the past couple of months as I think of them. I'm tired again now!