Hong Kong Day One+

Thirteen hours on a direct flight from Vancouver seemed like an eternity, but on demand tv, movies, and radio along with both ac and usb wall outlets assured us that we'd have plenty to occupy ourselves. 

Nathan St. in TST in Kowloon (not even Hong Kong Island) makes Michigan Ave look like Hawthorne Blvd.   It even makes Tokyo look like Michigan Ave.  Countless Rolex, Sony, and jewery stores and only a block away from our hotel.

Curious question: why is the toilet paper outside the bathroom?  Curiouser: where is the shower we were promised?  Answer: see the drain on the floor?  The handheld faucet on the wall?  The bathroom and shower are one and the same!  It truly is a water closet!

Calling all villagers middleaged through senior:  tai chi, tai chi swords, and tai chi fans being offered in every free space of public park every morning. Music provided. Just drop you bags and come on down.  The guys from the Big in Asia webside claimed to have only lasted a day or two in Vietnam before they couldn't help but participate, so we'll see whether our humility and lack of coordination can keep us on the spectator side of things.  

Asia deals in several goods we're not supposed to bring back, so today we explored a few we knew we couldn't bring back: the flower market and the bird market. The flowers were large and exciting though the enormous selection of enormous bulbs turned my head the most. The bird market on the other hand was a market with which I was unfamiliar. In a corner of what was once just a public park has been home to countless proprietors selling small birds in small cages. I recognized finches and parakeets, but along side them were countless others, some sparrowlike and others more tropically colored. Many still covered in down due to the recentness of their birth. Of course not all ate just seed, so the selection of live crickets far rivaled Jeanne's colony she bred for her chamelion, Clyde.

Odd lunch habits:  It took me awhile to realize that of the two teapots they gave us during dim sum only one contained tea while the other only bore hot water. Maybe the hot water teapot was reserved for refilling the tea filled tea pot but thst didn't quite make sense until I looked around. Everyone else seemed to be using the hot water pot to clean their dishes before eating!  After filling their teacups with hot water they proceeded to empty the water into their soup bowls and roll them around as a sort of rinse cycle.  Some even continued by rinsing the tips of their chopsticks in the water as well. Those who participated in this ritual were eventually handed plastic bowls into which all used hot water could be poured and removed from the table. One woman even decided to carry out the whole affair using tea. As an all vegetarian restaurant Jeanne felt confident ordering wantons, eggrolls, and buns, while I enjoyed the harmony of ordering a dish with both black and white fungus. It was a more formal restaurant and certainly very clean so the whole rinsing procedure just confused us. Of course we brought in our special form of shame by not finishing every single bite of food. My fungus and noodle dish was huge and the waiter probably encouraged Jeanne to order one or two more dim sum items than she could handle. We tried real hard but had we eaten any more Monty Python routines may have ensued.

We ended the day looking across the harbor at Hong Kong's seisure inducing skyline of ad covered buildings that start flashing in unison to cheesy music every night at 8pm. The smog above the city really makes the lasers and searchlights stand out.