D-57 to D-54, joyeuses paques

I spent the beginning of the Easter holiday sulking about how we weren't travelling anywhere exotic, but it has turned out to be a great long weekend after all.

It began at trendy resto Duo on Thursday night, where we celebrated Celine's birthday and shamelessly took over her present of a wine scent kit to guess the smells ourselves. Each of the 45 vials have a distinct aroma that can be found in wine, and it's actually quite fun to try to find a smell without knowing what it is. Once you know the answer it seems obvious, but before then some of the guesses can be rather amusing. For example, Krusty thought that the vial of "toast" smelled like formaldehyde. Don't know where he's been having breakfast!

The next day we relaxed at home quietly for the first time in ages, and then made our way to the amazing frozen meat shop on Jervois Street to buy cheap but great quality lamb racks for the next day's bbq. We then went off to discuss grilling recipes with Paola and Ignacio over xiao long bao dumplings at Crystal Jade. Krusty, of course, had to go for a crazy order as usual (this time it was crispy eel) but apart from that the meal was great. It's a real tourist trap type of place, right in the middle of the ifc mall, but I still think their traditional Shanghainese dumplings (filled with a soup that explodes in your mouth when you bite down through the dumplings' skin) are the best in town.

On Saturday the food frenzy continued as Ignacio, Paola and John came over to share Moroccan lamb racks, tabbouleh, tzatziki and lemon cake – all home made. We rounded the day off with a documentary called Mondovino, about the wine industry, and slept with full minds and fuller bellies.


Krusty – who claims "not to be a cake person" – asked for a rerun of the lemon drizzle cake on Sunday, so I quickly granted his wish so that we could bring something to Lantau, where our friend Dominique had invited us to spend the day. Her family have had a long history with Hong Kong since 1945, and their house is just behind the Giant Buddha, in an old nunnery in the middle of a tea plantation. It was a fantastically colonial day, and we walked the six dogs through the private forest in our tea dresses with mugs of wine at hand. I can't believe this kind of place still exists, it's amazing. The government is actually trying to take some of the land back, as they are not being used to farm tea anymore and therefore can be taken back for agricultural purposes, but for now it's just extraordinarily peaceful. After the walk we feasted on roast chicken, played croquet on the lawn and jumped in the pool, shouting in our best rah rah voices and feeling all imperial. Very un-pc but oh so satisfying!

Having spent the evening playing charades around the fire, we just couldn't bring ourselves to travel the hour and a half back to Hong Kong Island, so we extended the fantasy until the next morning, when we had to go back to reality to meet Meko and Dave, who came over for lunch with baby Jayden.

Now they are gone, I am looking over the pile of washing up that Krusty has before him (only fair) and feeling smug and satisfied with the way we managed to spend our "staycation". And Krusty managed to limit his work and Blackberry usage to just two mornings out of four. Very smug indeed... Take a look why!

D-58, fail

The shoes I am having made for the wedding weren't quite right, my professional printer is mocking me because the menus I want are too complicated to produce and the printer at home ran out of ink after just the first namecard I printed...

I sense Bridezilla is on her way to town...

D-59 15.27, pathetic

I snapped out of it, put my running shoes on and went for a run. As I saw myself run past the shop windows, I thought I looked really great, really pro, really fit.

1 minute and 30 seconds later and I was a sweaty, panting pig, missing only a spit roast to complete the disgusting picture.

I have been going to the gym this whole time thinking I was sporty spice, but when the ground isn't moving for me I can't even run for 10 minutes.

So. Pathetic.

D-62 to D-59, veg

I don't know if it's the rush and restlessness that came just before it, but my time off work has a distinct khaki-trouser-and-sweatshirt-hoodie tinge to it. I am having to find myself precise tasks to do outside the house just to stop myself from spending the whole day in my pyjamas.

Snap out of it lagitane.

D-70 to D-63, this week in Hong Kong

Krusty's mate Andy (or Flipperhead as we like to call him, as he is on a worldwide diving tour of oceanic proportions) is in Hong Kong at the moment, and being a hostess has distracted me from my blogging duties.

Here, then, are two images that summarise the past week in the fragrant harbour - the first is a look at popular bar area Lan Kwai Fong on the Saturday night of the Sevens (the annual rugby fest that attracts hordes of men dressed as women, chickens, priests - you name it - and compels them to buy, drink and throw liters and liters of beer over three days) and the second is a scene of protest against the Bank of China, including the pithy comment "Mini skirt is skirt, mini bond is no bond". While Westerners booze it up in stadiums and break windows in London, the Chinese sit in orderly rows of silent protest.


Sorry for the camera phone quality.

More importantly though, Krusty's brother gets married today, and thanks to brilliant, brilliant modern technology, we are going to be able to watch it via webcam!!

D-72 to D-71, uh oh, here comes another taxi rant

The cab ride to work was nauseating this morning.

Most HK cabs insist on having their dispatch radio on full blast, but usually my mind can block the sound out. This morning, though, I found myself counting how many times the woman on the other end said the same thing - with a record of 19 for one destination! When you consider that Cantonese is a rather harsh language (one friend likens it to cats fighting in her garden), this can make your ride into work seem very long indeed. Just to be clear, that's (at full volume and with radio crackling):

"Sam say sam sing dan say Sheung Wan, sam say sam sing dan say Sheung Wan, sam say sam sing dan say Sheung Wan, sam say sam sing dan say Sheung Wan, sam say sam sing dan say Sheung Wan, sam say sam sing dan say Sheung Wan, sam say sam sing dan say Sheung Wan, sam say sam sing dan say Sheung Wan, sam say sam sing dan say Sheung Wan, sam say sam sing dan say Sheung Wan, sam say sam sing dan say Sheung Wan, sam say sam sing dan say Sheung Wan, sam say sam sing dan say Sheung Wan, sam say sam sing dan say Sheung Wan, sam say sam sing dan say Sheung Wan, sam say sam sing dan say Sheung Wan, sam say sam sing dan say Sheung Wan, sam say sam sing dan say Sheung Wan, sam say sam sing dan say Sheung Wan"

And that's just one of them. A 30 minute traffic jam allows room for many more beautiful sentences to be repeated ad nauseum. It really made me feel ill.

I know what you are thinking. "Taxi?! If you're complaining about taking a taxi, get yourself on a bus. Or a tram. On yer bike!" And you would be right, of course. But that's not the point - I think this capacity for taxi drivers to allow such noise pollution to enter their workplace (often accompanied with loud fm radio debates, too) just demonstrates why this country is so unbearable - no one cares about jackhammers and horns and buses and drills and and and. Perhaps if everyone turned their radio off they would hear what an audible mess is going on around them and scale down the unnecessary roadworks that seem to take place everywhere, every day (the jackhammers at the bottom of our building have been there for 10 months now, moving a quarter of an inch a month...)

Be quiet Hong Kong. Then maybe I won't have to move half an hour away to get some peace and quiet (and even there will be noisy).

OK. Rant over.

D-75 to D-73, water, water everywhere

Every year in this tropical country, the skies open up for months on end, making commuting miserable and bad workmanship apparent (such as our lovely leaking ceiling in the bathroom, for example). But as soon as they close up again I seem to erase them from my memory, so once again this year, I am really surprised to see so much rain. It's still nice and humid of course, so we get the immense and almost physically impossible pleasure of being hot and sticky all day, while simultaneously getting drenched...

But the rain doesn't bother me because it gets us wet (in fact as a child I used to wait for it to rain to go out and play); rather, I hate the rain because of the killer umbrellas that come out in a crazy bid to pierce my eyes out or drip all of their collected drops on to my neck.

Every year my umbrellaphobia multiplies in strength, and today at lunchtime I worked myself into a frenzy, screaming at people who got anywhere near me with their death machines, trying to stab me with their spokes.

I suppose I need to calm myself down if I am going to go ahead with my plan to convince Krusty to move to a quieter location soon - completely exhausted by the noise of jackhammers waking me up every morning, as well as motivated by recent developments on our rooftop, I have a strong desire to find a new place for us to live.

And only 30 minutes' ferry-ride away lies Lamma - an island forbidden to cars, which has a reputation of being the last Hong Kong refuge of hippies. The cliché is still more or less true (not many investment bankers here, as the last ferry leaves at 11.30pm and most of those crazy financial types like to work past midnight...) but it is also slowly changing, and it is now the only place where one can find space, greenery and peace for a very reduced rent.

Sure there are no supermarkets, but you can order you food to arrive by online delivery. Sure you have to walk up a big hill to get home, but that just means you get a better view from the top! All of this might just be a pipe dream of course, as I haven't found one single place for rent yet, but it's still a dream.

As I said though, I might have to learn to calm down and deal with the killer umbrellas if I am going to live on an island full of super calm, chilled, peaced out hippies... Wonder how they will react to my kung fu umbrella defense tactics...?