Month: November 2020

First, I’m going to love on my husband a bit, the camera he bought me for Christmas is the best. I love the pictures I’ve been able to take with it and I’m constantly surprised by the zoom on this thing.

The second day we started to make some plans for what to do, and everything we were thinking about was closed so we decided to pick up some lunch stuff and go to a garden in the middle of HK.

As soon as the cab dropped us off there were flowers lining the road.

I don’t know what these purple flowers are, but I want to try to recreate them in icing for a cake, they are beautiful!

Hibiscus of different colors, I love hibiscus almost as much as plumeria

This gate was at the beginning of the garden- It made me realize we don’t hear much about China or their contribution/part in WWII. So I spent a bit of time after this trip looking it up and including finding a Chinese movie with Bruce Willis in it called Air Strike- the movie was a bit awful, but it did set me on to other movies about China in WWII like Empire of the Sun.

You can’t see it, but Mark is making his regular face under the mask, this is a different type of Lion statue than we have seen before.

Nestled back in the plants was a little stone lantern, that I had to look up because I thought it was a cute house, like a fairy house in a US garden.

It felt like walking in Spirited Away or another Miyazaki film. The mossy lizard statue just gave it an old world feeling that made me want to spend the day on that bench reading.

Mark got this amazing shot of the scarlet ibis, he managed to zoom in enough to not get the grates of the cage in the shot.

We sat by this beautiful fountain to have our lunch, It was kind of cool, while we were in HK but this day the sun was shining and it was perfect for a picnic.

We came to this garden to get out and walk around and see some sights, what we didn’t realize was that this was a zoo. It’s a free zoo in the middle of the city and on the outside is a garden area and all the animals are on the inside of the circle. It’s not a huge zoo by any means, but it was a nice zoo.

This gibbon is just hanging out eating an apple. We were only a few feet away from this guy, on the other side of a small wood fence, they made it very easy to get some great pictures.

His neighbor was a white Cheeked gibbon, and was also snacking on some fruit while staying close to the fence.

I had to add this picture because I just thought he looked so cool like he was walking at a party.

My dudes and the cat, it’s apparently contagious because Alex has caught the pet every cat we see bug. This zoo cat was extremely friendly and the boys probably spent about 10 minutes with her while I wandered off to take more pictures.

Even after we were able to drag Alex away from the cat, the cat followed him to get more pets. Who can refuse a scene like this?

Above is a squirrel monkey, we must have come around feeding time because every animal had a large selection of fruit to choose from.

One of my favorite monkeys ever, the cotton top tamarin. Back in my youth when I studied anthropology, this was the first primate I learned about.

This is a DeBrazza monkey, I don’t know much about them except that people aapparently like to have them as pets and they are very expensive.

The comment from these two is that at least with the masks on they don’t have to smile for pictures– Mark may wear a mask forever just for this reason.

An owl statue to go with our lizard statue friend from earlier. It makes me want to have a very green backyard with statues all over.

Not really on our radar to do before everything started closing, but walking distance from the zoo is the Victoria Peak Tram. Usually this is an extremely busy attraction with long lines, but for us it was a walk on no line experience.

This is a old fashioned tram that takes you up to the top of Victoria Peak so that you can look out over the whole of HK. It’s famous for having such a steep incline that buildings seem to folding into the mountain like in Inception when the city starts moving.

My patient guys, honestly I love these two so much, and they are such great travel companions.

I am holding the camera level to give you a perspective of the angle, it’s said that the grading is between 4 and 27 degrees at different parts of the track, but it feels like you are going almost vertical due to the optical illusion.

So again, I’ve got the camera lined up with the buildings to show you the angle we’re going up at, it’s hard to get a good picture of how the buildings look like they’re folding in.

At the top of the peak! Not many people know this about me, but I have a weird phobia of escalators- I blame the Chicago suburbs education system for showing us a safety video (the kind that showed kids doing stuff and getting hurt by crawling under garage doors and getting hit, that sort of thing) of security footage of a kid sitting on an escalator and his clothes getting sucked in and choking to death. I thought for a while I was the only one who remembered this video, but in China on our campus I met Marilyn who is the same (ish) age as me, grew up in Chicago suburbs and also has a escalator issue because she saw the same video!

So if you’re every hanging out with me and watching hesitate or flinch when I step onto an escalator, now you know why.

The reason for sharing my most embarassing phobia (seriously it’s so bizarre) is that to get to the top of the Peak, after you ride the tram, you have to ride up about 4000 esacaltors- alright this is a gross exaggeration but it is legitimately on the order of 15 or so. Add heights to the esacalator issue and you have a very nervous person by the time you reach the top.

But man, is the view worth it! I was thrilled to make it all the way up here because it was a view like no other.

We had to wait a minute because there was a line to take pictures in the Heart, neither of them cared- this was purely a “make Mom happy” picture.

It was too hard to get a picture of, but there were two hawks soaring above us at the peak just circling and coming in close to the trees and then flying back up high.

On the way down we sat in the front of the tram (you go down backwards) so I could get a shot of the tracks.

I love this picture of little man, it reminds me of a picture from our exploratory trip to China when he was 7 and we were on a boat in West Lake- he’s changed so much and not at all, all at the same time.

When I landed in Shanghai post Uganda, I was shocked to see the airport that empty. Regardless of the time we’ve landed, there has always been a line at immigration at least 30 people deep, this time there were maybe 5 people in front of me- all from my flight.

It was a surreal experience that would set the stage for our next trip and the next nine months (so far).

I got home and I was just so thrilled to see the boys, that first day/night is a bit of a blur. I know we did some unpacking and repacking, Alex got his souvenirs from Uganda, which we put aside because he’d have plenty of time to look at them when we got back from the family trip. We have been wanting to go to Hong Kong for a while now, but the timing was never right- given that there were less tourists this year due to protesting, we decided that this was our moment.

This was Jan 26th, when we were all just hearing about Covid and wondering what affect it was going to have on us in Haining. We went on our trip anyway, but bought masks to wear on the airplane just to be on the safe side. The airport wasn’t as busy as usual and we didn’t have a full flight to Hong Kong, which I don’t think would be the case under normal circumstances.

When we got to Hong Kong, we hopped on the train that takes you from the airport to the main section of down town. The ride there is really beautiful and you get to look out the windows and see some amazing countryside.

We were staying a smaller hotel on a busy street, the benefit of that being that we were walking distance to the metro line- which was a lot important given that I was still limping everywhere we went. The first night we checked in to the hotel, they took our temperatures and then sent us on our merry way. When we went down in the morning, a table had been set up with disposable masks, hand sanitizer and a thermometer- and every time in or out they would take our temps and write that down with our room number. It wasn’t a big deal yet and we were kind of joking around about it but we followed the rules and we kept our masks on all day while we were out.

The downside to all this is that big attractions in Hong Kong kept closing due to covid- museums, Hong Kong Disney (let me tell you how heartbroken Mark was not) New Year’s festivals. So we decided to make the best of what was still open and have our best possible time.

First stop was to a bagel shop (we’re nothing if not predictable) It was a cute little shop and not terribly busy when we were there .

It had kind of a New York Subway type vibe to it.

This next picture is one of the last ones without Face masks on in public, the rest of the trip is our faces covered (which isn’t always a bad thing).

Alex got a plain bagel with plain cream cheese and was very happy with his choice (he has since ventured out quite a bit on bagel flavors)

Mark is also a plain bagel guy, but his sandwich was really good.

I was pleasantly surprised although it was a little ungainly to eat.

After the bagel shop stop, we walked around the shopping area down town. We weren’t looking for anything in particular but found a Marks and Spencers to pop in. Its a UK store that I didn’t get a chance to go to in Liverpool, but it’s similar to a Target in the US in so much as it has clothes for men women and children, groceries, but not so much electronics or household goods type stuff. We ended up getting Alex some clothes there since they fit him a bit better than some things we can find in China.

I liked seeing the double decker skinny trolleys, they reminded me of the Knight Bus from Harry Potter.

They had a Five Guys in Hong Kong, we didn’t go eat there but it was weird to see a US company out of the blue like that. Hong Kong had a lot of amazing food options, you could be there for weeks and not have to have the same thing twice.

The boys were the most excited by Ichiran, the Japanese Ramen place that was their favorite spot in Japan. This wasn’t 100% the same as the ramen in Tokyo but I think I was the only one who noticed.

Those are some happy ramen faces. The big plus was we waited an hour to eat at Ichiran in Tokyo , and almost walked right in here in HK.

That is an amazing bowl of rameny goodness right there, a little spice added, but I forgot to add extra garlic and green onions.

We knew when we were getting ready to leave for HK that there were still protests going on, and I thought a lot about how to deal with it as a tourist and how I was going to reflect on it here on the blog. We didn’t see any protests going on, partially because we avoided the areas that they were planned for or that we knew had happened the day before– but we were crossing a bridge to get to something and saw this from up there.

We saw very little graffiti, although some stickers on walls- I thought a lot about what we would do if we happened across the protests- as a Mom I don’t think I could watch kids get beat back by police, but I didn’t have to test my nerves on it. There will be more on this in a later post and I’ll hopefully have a better response to the importance of this issue.

We went to a famous place Mark found called Duck &Waffles, there is a clear duck theme here.

Duck topiaries and egg lights, the theme ran deep.

We picked a goat cheese bread starter, which was good, but there was significantly more bread than cheese- my preference would always lean the other direction.

I had this lovely fish over peas and vegetables, it was so tasty, I would get that again in a heart beat!

Alex got a very fancy sushi served on a salt block, he was a little underwhelmed by the amount of food but it was very delicious.

He was also a little excited at being in a fancy ish restaurant as the youngest person around that we saw.

Mark’s duck & waffle, the signature dish. He was very happy with it and I think would recommend it to anyone who went there. So far so good on our HK vacation!