March 28 2012

Before I talk about today, I just remembered that I took a photo with my phone during the taxi ride in from the airport a couple of days ago. Check this out!

This guy had no fewer than SIX mobile phones - four regular and two smartphones - fixed to a rack on the top of his dashboard. You can clearly see them in the photo. They are all plugged in and the driver has an earpiece/microphone stuck in his ear. All the way in from the airport he was chattering away on one or other of the mobiles, all of which seemed to be linked to his earpiece. People were calling him, he was putting people on hold, making calls and generally switching from one to another the whole time. Astonishing!

Last night was great. On Dave's recommendation I had made a reservation at Aqua Roma/Tokyo, which is a dual cuisine (Japanese and Italian) restaurant on the 29th floor of the Peking One building, right near our hotel. The tables are on terraces within the restaurant, so wherever you sit you can admire the view of the harbour and across to Hong Kong Island. The bar is on the highest terrace of all, and our dining table was right at the front, next to the windows. My phone camera doesn't really do it justice, but to give you an idea, this was the view from our position in the bar...

Lovely meal, too. We both chose Japanese food and really enjoyed it. By the way, I now realise that I made a mistake with the exchange rate in yesterday's post. That breakfast in the hotel was £36, not £54!

Today, we completed the two legs of the tour bus route that we didn't get around to yesterday, one of them here in Kowloon and the other over on the island, which took us as far as Stanley and Aberdeen. The Kowloon sector was just as I imagined Hong Kong to be when away from the skyscrapers, and this photo taken from the top deck of the bus gives you an idea of what I mean...

First thing this morning we took our dirty clothes to a little Chinese laundry in this area, and they washed and folded (but didn't iron) 12lbs of laundry for about £3.60! We could have had it ironed for about double that, but they couldn't it back to us in time. After the bus tours, we returned to collect the laundry and then popped into a local cafe for a snack. To be honest, it wasn't up to much. We each had a different variation of prawns with noodles, and the prawns were virtually transparent, so we just scoffed the noodles and left the prawns on the plate. I don't know what they must have thought, but we weren't prepared to take the chance!

The last leg of the bus tour took us to the south side of the island, where we saw the resort of Stanley and then took a sampan ride around Aberdeen harbour. This next photo was taken by the guy driving the sampan, and the "building" in the background is a huge floating restaurant moored in the middle of the harbour.

This evening we're off to the nearby night market and will try to summon up the courage to try another local restaurant - hopefully with better luck this time.

Jenny's bit: A lot of sitting on buses today so looking forward to a long walk up to the night market its a bit overcast so no lovely sunset like last night. Jx