Christmas Day!

And finally Christmas day was here!

The morning started well with Pip the Polar bear bringing me a cup of tea (or maybe it was Stephen and I put Pip there to make it look cute, who knows).

We opened our pressies from each other (DVDs, CDs, Perfume, Pom pom makers & my favourite sweets and crisps - thanks Stephen!!) before heading out for our fancy lunch. I anticipate this being the first and last time in our lives that we ever have Christmas dinner at the Ritz-Carlton and on the 103rd floor of a building!!

It gets points from me for providing festive hats, garlands and hooter!

Compulsory cracker

Free flow champagne - don't mind if we do!

Excited for tasty food!! 

We even met Santa!! (he was giving out present bags too containing cute bears but sadly just for the kids!!) 

Christmas Carols!

I'm afraid I didn't take many pictures of the food - I was just too excited by the amazing selection and ensuring I ate and drank as much as I possibly could in the interests of value for money!! Needless to say the food was amazing - so much choice. Often in restaurants here the meat is of debatable quality so it was great to be able to eat proper roast ham and turkey etc!! Still I think we both missed a proper roast with yorkshire puddings and stuffing so if anybody is volunteering to make us one when we get back in March.... :)

Dessert! Didn't quite manage it all after the noodles, gold leaf covered dumplings(!) , roast potatoes and everything else I ate! 

The view of Hong Kong Island from the 103rd floor (the Ritz-Carlton is or was the highest hotel in the world) - it was a bit misty but I was too busy eating and drinking to mind...

After dinner we thought we'd walk to the Star Ferry and get back to the Island by boat - it's still one of our favourite modes of transport and a novelty that you can use public transport on Christmas day! We saw some cute Santa post boxes en route....

We walked past all the designer shops and they were all so busy - queues outside all of them, shopping is apparently what the Chinese do on Christmas day and from the sizes and brands of their shopping bags they're spending a lot of money!!

Once back on the Island Stephen took me to see a Christmas installation at one of the shopping centres he'd seen whilst out christmas shopping.

Amazing! They'd created a mini ski village with ski lodge and running cable car system! Made me miss the snow quite a lot, hopefully we will get to the mountains next year (well, 2014 so technically the one after!) or perhaps South Korea / Japan this year if I ever source those cheap flights... not that we have any warm clothes / ski gear with us here!!

And since it was Christmas we thought we'd go for a few more drinks!! Admittedly once we'd left the hotel the main thing I felt like doing was going to bed and sleeping but we'd walked it off a bit and I'd woken up by the time we got to Soho!

My favourite $30 (£2.50) cocktail bar 

We then went to the Yorkshire Pudding to make us feel a bit closer to home!!! 

Christmas day mojito

About 8pm it was time to stop drinking and go home to Skype the families and catch up on Christmas Day back in the UK, we'd also saved lots of presents under our tree for later which was really nice to come back to!

We'd also started to get peckish again so thought we'd have christmas day pizza! We thought we'd try a new place (we'd seen before but rejected it because it's more expensive and you get a smaller slice than our usual place) - the pizza was good but nothing that great and we were still hungry afterwards.

Hence the obvious thing to do was go to Paisanos (the usual place) down the road and order a full pizza!! It must have been Christmas because we got a taxi home afterwards (£6), we're normally cheap and get the MTR!

Christmas Pizza!

Ahhh tasty - it didn't last long!!

We then opened our presents under the tree that lovely family and friends had posted over to us which was so generous and seriously appreciated!! We had a Skype session with both families and was obviously great to see everyone on Christmas day even if we weren't there - a very different Christmas Day to normal but great fun nonetheless! 

Christmas Eve

I normally enjoy working Christmas Eve - it feels like a waste of holiday to use a days annual leave since the tradition for the last four years has been to turn up, order bacon sandwiches, do a few christmas quizzes and then go to the pub at lunchtime!

Unfortunately Christmas isn't a big celebration in Hong Kong so my day was a little less fun that I had hoped!! The company Stephen works for are kind and let them all leave at 2pm, the company I work for just treated it as a normal day, boo!

Still, I had a Pip the Polar bear tin full of sweets to keep me going!! 

And we had a trip to the Dim Sum restaurant in our building (which I didn't even know existed, and is really good!) for lunch which was nice and sociable and good to hear everyone's plans for Christmas.

I finally escaped the office at 5:15 and positively skipped down to the MTR station to get home and meet Stephen. We went to a rooftop bar at a posh hotel down the road from us - it has happy hour 5-7pm each weekday but we're generally working then! It was fab

Happy hour cocktail numero uno

Numero duo! It was pretty cool watching it get dark and being sat outside on the 32nd floor - we did have an outdoor heater and it started to get a little bit chilly...

We then went to our new favourite restaurant - Thai Pepper. It's just down the road in a similar 'mansion' block and it's really tasty, good quality and cheap Thai food.

Quick stop at the supermarket on the way home... Cider and Ice Cream - essentials! As you can see there's no crazy queues at the tills in Hong Kong on Christmas Eve and they're even giving you 10% off for no particular reason!

Then it was home to wrap up each others pressies (nothing like leaving it till last minute... I managed to grab the last sheet of decent wrapping paper in the newsagents at lunchtime but the majority of Stephen's pressies were wrapped in slightly dodgy prints!!) and go to bed hoping Santa knew our new address!!

Festive Fun!

Merry (belated) Christmas all! We've been having lots of festive fun here in Hong Kong despite having to work! We get the standard holidays here - Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Years day but have been working in between. This hasn't been too bad and it means we've saved our annual leave for adventures - in a couple of weeks we're going to Taipei, in February we go to Bangkok and then back to the UK in March, exciting! We get three days off in February for Chinese New Year and we were quite fancying jetting off somewhere but flights are £££ and it seems it's rainy season at any beach resorts where the flights are reasonably priced! I'll keep an eye out for any good last minute deals but it's more than likely we'll just stay here - should be some good fireworks at least and I'm happy knitting.... might have to actually get some food in though as a lot of places close up!

On the Friday before Christmas we went to a tram party! A group of us in work decided to hire one and continue the office christmas party well into the evening... I was put in charge of 'decorations' which resulted in everyone being given a reindeer antler headband / santa hat / similar on arrival.

Stephen enjoying tram fun

It was a brilliant night, so so much fun - lots of beer was drunk, christmas tunes played and it just felt so nice and christmassy! After the tram we went for a chinese (naturally), there was 30 of us spread across 3 tables and we left it to the locals to order.... the majority of food was tasty and normal looking but a plate of goose legs did appear!!

Ah look, drunk westerners drinking cans of beer from the 7/11 in their chinese tea cups in a restaurant!!

The following day we were slightly worse for wear but I was super excited to get up and go to the cinema...

Ahh LES MIS!!!

I very much enjoyed the film (not entirely convinced about Russell Crowe's singing mind), Stephen less so!

On Sunday we thought we'd carry on the Christmas party spirit and go for a few drinks (not that we need an excuse!).

I love Happy Hour Cocktails!

We befriended some random Australian guys in the next bar (their wives were working in the IFC Mall as bunny girls in the christmas show.... they asked for directions to the IFC and bought us two rounds of shots in return??) - they worked in the mines and were clearly loaded!  

Quick bit of sustenance at a Canadian hot dog bar! 

Hot dog bar! 

Amazing hot dog!! It was like Subway so doesn't come with mayo and other manky stuff unless you want it to - yumm!! Added bonus that they do sweet potato fries :)

And another quick drink before we headed home (it was a school night after all) - the only place I've found in HK so far that has the full range of Rekorderlig 

It also now has a tuckshop with 'loads of proper english sweets' AMAZING!! What more could you want from a pub but cider and sweets? Also apparently does a good pie, which we must try some time.

I'll leave you with some pictures I took from the bus on the way home of pretty christmas lights on tall buildings :)

O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum

...Wie grün sind deine Blätter!

Ta-dah!

Ok, so it's no Norwegian Spruce but I'm pretty chuffed we've now got a tree! One of my friends from knitting is heading back to Tasmania this week so was getting rid of all her stuff.... I went round to get a kettle and some plates but came back with a tree! (I did go back at the weekend for the kettle and plates so now we can make tea and have something to eat off, woohoo - don't think I have to go to Ikea again now!).

On Wednesday we had our knitting christmas get together - one lady hosted in her office and provided us with some very nice red wine and the rest of us brought some snacks, it was good fun!

I finally got round to crochet-ing that snowflake.

Not bad for 20 mins work?!

For my gift I bought a christmas cross stitch, the one on the right went to secret santa, I'm currently stitching the one on the left - chances of it being done in time for christmas are slim! 

All wrapped up!

So, the party... I got a taste for vino, pressies in the middle and knitting away! 

No knitting party is complete without some ball winding?! I got two balls of Noro for my secret santa so was pretty chuffed with that! Did trade one of them for the aforementioned kettle mind! 

A wool shop! One lady told me about this place which happens to be in the shopping centre down the road from us and I hadn't discovered it yet! Naturally I had to go hunt it down when I got back, despite it being 10:30pm...

And then when I finally got home it was bread and ribena for tea... rock and roll!

On Saturday we decided to have a flat warming / christmas gathering...

Tree again - we even have some pressies under it :) 

Festive table! 

Fridge full of supplies! 

We even put a video of a festive fire on youtube on the telly to pretend it's cold and christmassy....

Sunday was a very lazy day...

I went to the shopping centre for a mooch around and there was a string quartet playing some christmassy tunes which was most enjoyable so I stood and watched for a while 

Then came home and made a start on my hat!

Today I've been out for a Christmas lunch with colleagues (I'm not technically on their team but I seem to have made myself an honorary member) - we went to Pizza Express!! It was just like the UK (same price too, but no vouchers so it seems doubly ridiculous over here given how cheap you can eat out for) and I really enjoyed it as a change from noodles and rice!!

We've a few more Christmas lunches / parties coming up so the festive season is definitely in full swing and only a week to go! I really should go buy some presents......