errrrrrrrrrrrrr

One of my bestfriends decided to make a whirlwind visit to HK and arrived Monday night. Tuesday we started the day by ordering far too much food at the local congee shop, then mtr’ed out to TST to hit H&M where we tried on all the enormous ghetto fabulous gold jewellery and then krumped around the store, to IT to admire the on-sale-but-still-sell-your-liver-for-for-funding expensive designer clothes and accessories, past Chanel, LV, Dior to Miu Miu and then off to MK. Fatty, delicious roast goose noodle for lunch (we are fully recovered vegetarians) then shoe shops, Muji, initial. Exhausted, we stopped to take stickers on the 11th floor of Langham Mall, then off to TST, for a quick drink in Initial café and then back to the house before the weight of G’s shopping caused us to collapse. In the door, discard the bags and then off to meet Si, D, A and SJ for dinner in Shum Shi Po. Dinner was super yummy and very fried! I like.

Sunday I was thinking of lolling about the house, but DJ and TJ called and said they’d booked a squash court and that I should come along (Si was again shackled to his desk). I put on my exercising disguise and mtr’ed over to meet them at their place. It was so hot, I was exhausted after the two minute walk from the MTR station to their place. We then walked to the North Point Sports Center and $27 later we had the court for half an hour.



I’ve never played squash before and it is fun fun fun! It’s paticularly great because you don’t have to run very much, unlike tennis but lots of lunging about in a futile attempt to hit the ball, and maybe instead hit the wall (ahem).



Very satisfying to whack the bejezuz out of the little black rubber ball. TJ was saying a friend at college (that’s high school for all you North Americans) had a squash court and they used to play abit. Then every set the loser had to go stand against the wall and the winner got to take a free shot and try and hit them. Needless to say, we didn’t play with this incentive.



It's funny, there's a little mini bleacher outside one of the courts and some old guys come and lie on them in the airconditioning. As you can see, they found our playing riveting.



After squash, we walked through North Point's markets. Not sure why every market that isn't the Wan Chai market looks so much more appealing. The produce, fish and meat look so fresh and yummy! I bought fish cake, oyster mushrooms and fried fish skin for dinner that night. DJ took me to a stall she'd found which sold baby onesies that are super cute and HK$15 for two! What a bargain.

frogs for sale. not as pets

We ended up at a Korean dumpling place, where the soup was very odd (one was thick, gelatinous pepper soup and the other was sweetened condensed milk soup with corn in it) but the kim chi dumplings and the leek dumplings were delicious!

Last Friday night Emmy the Great rolled into town. She’s a singer songwriter, who’s originally from HK but emigrated to the UK when she was a tween. Cheezel had to work (til 4am) so I met up with TJ and DJ after work to go see Emmy play. I met up with them at Grappas Cellar at 8pm and they were drunk on deep fry from Jollibees, the super-fried Filipino fastfood answer to McDonalds. We wandered in and I gave Mark my drink coupon, as I have given up professional drinking.

Pixel toy, a local duo, were the opening act. They sang in canto and weren’t bad, sort of indie pop, but they weren’t particularly engaging or memorable. Then Emmy came on and the place was full by then. I’d bumped into Justin at the bar and he was with the bar manager Reese who said they’d sold out, all 400 tickets, something of a miracle in HK where small gigs tend to only get a handful of the indie-scene supporting regulars (and then a handful of journos who are there for free).

photo's taken with iphone, only the best for sleepyanimal!

It was just Emmy and her guitar. She was very polished, very comfortable with a bit of banter and then an almost non-stop set of her songs. She has a lovely voice that’s easy to listen to and clever lyrics. This made me laugh from Canopies and Grapes:
"Later on me and a bottle will hook up to have some fun
Then I'll call your house at twelve to let you know that I'm drunk
Say I'm sorry Mr C, I was just looking for your son
How are you, incidentally, do you know if he's out alone?
There is this book he lent to me something like seven months ago
I'm gonna burn it in the street be so kind as let him know
that I'm dealing
with this badly
and
could he please get back to me?

Amazingly, she even sang a Faye Wong song in canto! There was a guy in the crowd next to us who was loving her, laughing too hard at her jokes, and enthusiastically clapping and cheering, but he had to make up for the rest of the crowd, which were pretty much just standing back and watching.

Afterwards, we were all knackered, so we called it a night.

DJ and 101 menus

Sunday I caught up with my pal DJ for afternoon tea in Tin Hau. We decided to try Les Artistes cafe on Electric road.

It's on the first floor, you press the buzzer and someone unlocks the heavy grill gate. Upstairs there's a little bookshop, and then quite a large cafe. The girl brought over a bunch of menus - drinks menu, food menu, specials, afternoon tea set etc. DJ ordered the cookies and cream cheesecake and caramel tea, while I opted for peanut butter thick toast with sweetened condensed milk and mint tea. Mysteriously, when they served my toast it was sprinkled in dry parsley flakes. Granted, they were tasteless, so didn't affect the flavour, but still, it wasn't particularly attractive so not sure why they did it.

DJ's cheesecake was very rich and a bit sweet for me, but my toast was perfect, perfectly crisp with a bouncy centre and who can resist condensed milk and peanut butter? DELISHOUS!


After we'd eaten, we strolled about Tai Hung, looking at what new cafes and shops had opened. I really like Tai hung in the weekend, when all the panel beaters are closed and it's just people walking their dogs (or mostly carrying their dogs) and it's all quirky little craft stores and bakeries.

We came across a petstore and DJ cannot resist looking at the cat toys (DJ, points to piece of feathery string, "now that's good cat toy.") She came across one that at first i thought was an eraser, but turned out to be a stanley/carpet knife. Which squeaked. Go figure.

viaJohn Martz's flickr via notcot

Ghetto Fabulous!

Hadn't seen D and A in a while, so we organised to meet up last Saturday night for supper. A had found the supper place on open rice, a honky food review site, and had a craving for satay. "Don't eat too much dinner!" D reminded us, as the last few times we've had supper, we've eaten dinner beforehand and had been too full to really eat much. We took this advice seriously, and split a three egg, whitebait omelette (delicious).

D & A came round at 10.30pm to pick us up in their little peugeot.As we were driving out to Shau Kei Wan it suddenly started pouring and it was hard to see anything, coupled with the fact that Shau Kei Wan seems to consist of only one way streets, we hurtled about trying to find the little supper place. I started to feel a little carsick (I pretty much always get carsick unless I am the driver) and began yawning non-stop (this happens when i feel nauseas) and scrambled about in my handbag looking for a plastic bag in case I threw up. Luckily, A parked the car and we got out to find the place on foot.

We wandered around the neighbourhood and then finally found it, tucked down a sort of walk way off the main road. We sat down at a little table outside on the pavement. Luckily for me, by then i had recovered my appetite, and we ordered a bunch of pork, chicken, lamb and beef satay, as well as a plate of fried rice. When the satay came out, it was all on one place and all covered in sauce, so it was a mystery to us which meat was which.

The sauce was delicious and the satay were mostly juicy and tasty (I think D got a very tough mutton one to start with). The rice was good, it tasted a lot like salted fish chicken rice.

D & A always say the funniest things, but i should write them down as when i come to write my blog, i can never remember them. When we had finished supper, the owners little girl came out to ask if we wanted to order any more. She was teeny tiny, turned out to be 5. She was talking to us then she said to Si in canto, "Why don't you speak cantonese?" I explained it was because he was a gweilo (whitey), and i told her i was from overseas. She said, "Your voice is very English."

She was pretty funny. She asked us to guess her favourite cartoon character, and we couldn't think of any children's cartoons that weren't shaun the sheep or sesame street. When she told us the answer we had to admit none of us had heard of that cartoon. Boy, did we feel out of touch then.

Grandma, Brian and Ida at yum cha

Last Saturday I went out to the wilderness to visit my grandmother. I met up with my cousin Brian and his gf Ida and then we all took the bus out to the New Territories. Si couldn't come because he had to work all day.

Out in Yuen Long we trooped off to Grandma's favourite yum cha restaurant, Wing Wah, which she's been patronising for over 40 years! Wing Wah make the egg rolls in the purple and red square tins you can buy at Chinese supermarkets the world over. We were a bit late, but luckily grandma is such a good customer that they held the table for her.

After lunch we went for a walk around Yuen Long to buy various things. First we stopped at Grandma's favourite greengrocer in the market where i bought a couple of ears of pearl and barley corn. The produce out there looks so much fresher and more appealing than the stuff you can buy at Wan Chai market. I wanted to buy lots of vegies, but was deterred by the fact I'd have to carry them home and we really don't have the fridge space.



While I was there I spotted the fishmonger opposite had whitebait on display. In HK they call it white rice fish and it's cheap cheap cheap. I bought a catty (600grams) and it cost me $10HK which is about NZ$2-3! In NZ whitebait is expensive, and that much would easily be $20-25NZ.

We then wandered over to a noodle shop on the other side of town, which is famous for it's wontons and bought some uncooked ones to take home, and then we went to Hang Heung, to buy wifecakes and egg tarts.

the coolness factor went to 11 when they added the white tiger. and so did the bogan factor

I have a very bad temper and when i lose it (which is more often that i'd like to admit) there's usually a torrent of swearing, followed by me throwing whatever's handy. That used to be my phone, and so after smashing up a couple of very nice mobiles, i bought a Nokia sport phone which was shock proof. However, it took the fun out of throwing it, and it went largely unharmed.

Si used to joke he should get me a Panasonic tough book. They're the nigh indestructible (tick joke there, anyone get it? ahhh, whatever) computers that special forces take into jungles etc!

Forbes ran it through it's paces, using it to crush coke cans, poured coke on the keys, backed over it, sprinkled the keys with crushed doritos, used its screen as a dart board, gave it to a white tiger as a chew toy, got an elephant to stomp on it and culminated with... shooting it. They were impressed to find, complete with hole in screen, it still booted up just fine. Their conclusion? The Grigori Rasputin of computers.

viagizmodo

My favourite cat Maru has a little pal, a hedgehog named Harry!

But actually, i wonder how much Maru likes him...

hahahahaha

Not only a sexy design, but also futuristically functional! Orange have come up with this concept for a solar powered tent, which generates enough juice to power a flexible LCD screen and wifi.

More on it here at gizmodo.

More trees here.

via tutztutz via notcot

Thursday night I opened up Si's mac, because it's so much faster than my poor old smack book. I was curious about a video game he'd downloaded and become addicted to before going to Shanghai called Plants vs Zombies. I can confirm this game is super addictive! I started playing at 10pm, at 12pm I was thinking "one more level" and the next time I looked at the clock it was 2.30am! On a school night. Tried to go to sleep, but my brain was whirring with "Dum dum dur, A zombie ate your brains!!" and didn't fall asleep until 3.30am. Got up at 7.30am to go to work and was not in the best of shape (obviously because a zombie ate my brains).

Si was supposed to come home on Friday, but then it became Saturday and then Sunday morning, and finally he got home 9pm on Sunday night. Just in time to go back into the office on Monday. Poor cheezel looked exhausted.

Yum Cha

I had an eventful Saturday night. Friday night was benign, spent on the couch playing plants vs zombies like some sort of crack head. Saturday morning I met up with my cousin Brian and his gf Ida for yum cha. I've never met Brian before, us having lived on continents very far apart (actually, new zealand's not a continent, but anyhoo, you get the idea) but he's a really great kid. His gf is lovely also. We spent lunch laughing over local stuff, like the crazy local names. I was telling him that people have really unusual English names here because they choose them themselves. After lunch he was served at a store by a Sunrise.

All you can eat K BBQ
Saturday night I was planning on mooching at home, but DJ called and said she and TJ probably didn't have swine flu so let's meet up for all you can eat K BBQ in North Point. AJ and DJ's friend David came along too and we walked to the restaurant, despite the fact it was sticky hot at 30C and 95% humidity. The restaurant was next to Japanese Restaurant and was fittingly called Korea restaurant.

They had a long table which was laden with metal dishes covered in different cuts of meat. The labels were all in chinese so we had no idea what was what. They also had several plates of kim chi! All you can eat kim chi!! yum yum yum

DJ, who is a great cook and an even better hostess, took over the bbqing duties, so everytime you looked down at your plate it had miraculously refilled with miscellaneous bbq'ed pork and shrooms. Not bad for $128 (of course, with beer and soju it was a little more).



All down hill from there
When we'd all eaten so much we felt sick, TJ suggested we roll round the corner for dice games, beer and karaoke at Focus Bar. Of course, after a few shots of soju at dinner this seemed like a great idea.

We ordered several buckets of beer and the boys headed to the bar to program the karaoke machine. They put on a number of K classics like 'sweet caroline' and 'especially for you'. TJ and DJ did a rawther lovely duet of "A whole new world" but the breakout performance was from David, who is a white aussie but can speak fluent Mandarin and can read simplified chinese. The natives were super impressed that he could sing Mando pop by reading the subtitles!

Si's uncle's have an amazing party trick where they can open beer bottles using their eyebrow bone, dj gives it a go

We played dice games, drank if we won, drank if we lost. We played electronic darts, we sang some more melodic western pop. Then somehow AJ was pulled into a private room to drink with a bunch of local kids (they were all of 20), and suddenly we were all in there playing drinking games and losing and drinking large amounts of whiskey.

yup, we look amazing

At 3.30am we decided to call it a night and AJ, David and I escaped in a cab.