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!