Shelly has just e-mailed me from Shanghai, where she is currently on business, with this bit of news:
Tried to open the blog today and it wont open - the
sensors are after you.
Photography-speaking, I get lucky every once in a while. I had a clear evening when heading back from Kowloon on the Star Ferry recently. Here's a view of Hong Kong Island from the harbour, with the convention center in the foreground and Victoria Peak in the background. Amazingly, this photo was taken with my phone.
Dusk was falling when I got back to Wan Chai. Traffic was light because it was a weekend.
From Wan Chai, I hopped on one of Hong Kong's old-fashioned trams and rode it home. I have some day-time photos of these trams which I will post in a day or two.
When Princess Ernie wasn't busy chasing the camera strap, she gladly posed for this portrait.
Crap. I'm posting photos of our cats. That's the first step on the path to thinking of them as my children.
We headed out this morning to climb Victoria Peak, the tallest mountain on Hong Kong island. Knowing that I would climb more slowly than Shelly, I left an hour or so before she did and met her at the top. We'd both been to Victoria Peak before, but never under our own power. This is why most people who visit the top decide to take some form of vehicular transportation:
Most of them take the Peak Tram, which has been in operation since the late 1888 and, at one point, climbs a 27 degree incline. This is how we each reached the peak the last time.
There are as many routes for the first few legs of the climb as there are streets in Hong Kong, but we decided to follow the Tramway Path until it ends, which is about halfway up.
After an hour or so of climbing, I was finally above most of the buildings below me, from the skyscrapers in Central and Admiralty to the high-rise apartments in the Mid-Levels. It took Shelly much less than an hour to reach this point. What can I say ... I'm slow.
Amazingly, we timed our arrival at the top almost perfectly. It was windy and cool at the top but, unfortunately, the pollution from eastern China -- which seems to obscure the view most days -- kept us from getting great photos. It was not nearly this hazy a decade ago, the last time I was here. Still, these photos seemed to turn out okay.
As we joined the throngs of tourists at the top, we tried not to feel too superior, knowing that most of them had not climbed the mountain on their own. The Peak these days is full of fancy shops and a variety of restaurants, including one of only two Burger Kings in Hong Kong.
How's that for fast food trivia?
Ernie (full name: Most Perfect Princess Ernestine, our tribute to some Filipina-style names), left, and Fat Choy (from the Chinese New Year greeting Gung Hei Fat Choy), have settled in quite well and seem to be content in calling our home their home.
Fat Choy is demonstrating her good taste in using my Mac PowerBook as a pillow, while Ernie shows off her smarts by napping on a copy of the Internal Revenue Service Publication 17. That's some great reading, let me tell you.
Ernie and Fat Choy have at least one person who sympathizes with them in our odd choice of names. Shelly's mom recently wrote "what horrid names for little girls!" in an e-mail to us. I can't argue with her; in fact, that's probably some of the appeal of their names.
I hate laundry.
It's not the washing -- even though two loads in a U.S.-style washing machine equals four or five loads in our teeny tiny Euro-style machine -- or the folding, or even in the putting away. (Of course, I rarely put the laundry away any more, as my lack of proper folding skills tends to result in Shelly refolding most of what I've done, anyway.)
It's that we live nine stories above the streets below. (Our address says we live on the seventh floor, but with Hong Kong's European style of floor numbering -- where the floor at street level is generally called "ground" and the floor above street level is "one" -- and hills -- where buildings frequently end up with floors below ground level -- we're actually nine stories up.) It's enough to make a guy miss a big, sprawling clothesline in the backyard.
You see, in order to hang our laundry out to dry -- there's no dryer in our apartment -- I am required to lean out a 12-inch gap in the window, pull a 12-foot, plastic-covered bamboo pole into our one-butt kitchen, prop one end of the pole on the window sill and the other on the counter and, finally, clip the wet laundry onto the pole.
That's not the tricky part, of course. Neither, technically, is picking up the pole, bunching up the sheets or shirts or towels or whatever enough to move them over the window sill, lean back out the 12-inch gap and replace the pole on its holder. The tricky part, as we have discovered on separate occasions, is doing all of that while managing to not knock the poles which are already outside out of their holder and to the street nine stories below.
Perhaps the worst part of the whole thing is that the poles are too long to fit in the lift, so after retrieving the fallen one, you get to enjoy a nine story climb back to the apartment.
Shelly is in the poultry business, yet had somehow managed to never eat these Chinese delicacies -- until last week, when she ate them for three consecutive meals. Known as chicken feet on the menu or chicken paws in the industry, there's really not much to eating a chicken's foot. You kind of stick it in your mouth, take a bite, chew that bite until the skin sort of disintegrates in your mouth, then spit the bones back on to your plate. Though they're fairly inoffensive, they're not exactly at the top of my favorite foods list.
Perhaps I'll serve them for dinner tonight ... it is a special day after all. Happy birthday, Shelly!
Wow...taking a look at my poor, neglected blog, I note it's been a month since I last updated it.
More surprisingly, that means it's been nearly a month since we moved to Hong Kong. Where has the month gone??
• Setting up our apartment. At approximately one-third the size of our house in Manila, we're much closer to each other than we were previously. Shelly refers to our kitchen as a "one butt kitchen." I'd say that's about right.
• Setting up Shelly's office. Admittedly, this has been mostly Shelly's job, but I have pitched in here and there, running errands and delivering things while Shell waits for the company's secretary to start work a couple weeks from now.
• Walking, walking, walking. I've spent most of my free time outside, walking around this incredible city. This has been the real reason I haven't blogged much. I'm rarely home, prefering the beautiful autumn weather of Hong Kong to spending time in the apartment.
• Enjoying the beautiful autumn weather of Hong Kong. Hey, it's cool again! I can wear pants without sweating! (That doesn't mean that I actually am wearing pants, just that I can from time to time.)
• Looking for a church. We've been to several different churches as we look for a new church home. We've been to an Anglican cathedral with loads of Brits and Filipinas, an international non-denominational church with an interesting cross section of nationalities and a Lutheran church with lots and lots of Americans. We're getting close to finding one, I think.
• Adopting two cats. Most Perfect Princess Ernestine and Fat Choy moved in a couple weeks ago after we adopted the sisters from the cattery at the Hong Kong SPCA. I used to make fun of people who used names like Princess or Fluffy for their cats -- we planned to call her Ernie -- but Princess fit Ernie's personality to a T when she moved in when she needed lots and lots of attention. Ernie has relaxed a bit, but Princess seems to be sticking as a name. Fat Choy is the trouble-maker of the two, already finding her way past all of Shelly's cat-proofing efforts to a perch on the narrow ledge outside our 7th floor window (more cat-proofing has since taken place) and spending the night at the vet after eating something that made her throw up 18 times in 12 hours.
• Using the words "weeing" and "pooing" with the British vet at the SPCA.
• Enjoying the convenience of grocery home delivery. Don't want to lug cases of beer and Coke up the hill to the house? Just call for delivery!
Now that we're settled in, I should be back online more often. Sorry for the delays in getting this update up. I'll get some photos up soon.
