Posh Food and Pandas

I'll start with the pandas - unfortunately not real ones, these are in the IFC Mall for Chinese New Year and I couldn't resist taking lots of photos, so cute!

Only 5 more days of work then we get 3 days off for Chinese New Year - cannot wait! We'll be starting the long weekend with a trip to Macau Sat-Sun, my first trip out of Hong Kong - finally the start of our adventures (after the failed trip to Taipei). Stephen has been to the UK, Singapore and India since we got here but for work so not exactly adventures!

Speaking of Chinese New Year Stephen took himself to the bank one morning this week to queue up for these:

Lots of crisp $20 and $50 notes to give out as 'lai see' - more on this another time!

We got a letter through last week informing us that something was leaking and they needed to erect scaffolding out of our kitchen window to repair it - we're still not entirely sure what it was all about but here's some pics anyway.

It's all been taken down now - hopefully whatever they needed to fix is fixed, difficult to communicate when they don't speak English and we don't speak Cantonese...

Clearly not scaffolding but a pretty picture I took from the bus on the way home Friday night.

This weekend I've finished my crochet squares - ta dah!

Laid them all out in a suitably random/pretty order:

And started joining them all together:

Almost there!

And the posh food? One of Stephens friends from work is heading back to NZ tomorrow so had a leaving party last night. It was at a 'private kitchen' which is an unlicensed restaurant (so you can take your own booze) that puts on a set menu. We were quite brave (for us) accepting the invite since we're both quite picky with food and don't like fancy things but well we're only in HK once and you have to be sociable don't you! It was really good fun - a french bistro restaurant on the 12th floor in the busiest part of town - so many places like this you have no idea exist. It turned out to be an 'alternate drop' menu (i.e. two different dishes for each course placed at alternate settings) which worked well for us meaning we got to try one of each. We ended up eating things we'd never normally order - lobster bisque and pan fried sea bass!?

Full menu: Starter - Deep Fried Goats Cheese / Foie Gras. Soup - Lobster Bisque / Mushroom. Lemon sorbet. Main - Seabass / Steak. Dessert - Chocolate Fondante / Apple Crumble. As you can see - not our usual choices....  It was $400 (£32) each so really good value considering the quality of the food and good fun to meet new people and have a few drinks!

Steak! 

Seabass

Chocolate Fondante.

After the meal we went to a '50s' club which was mildly entertaining but not somewhere we'll be going back I don't think! Drinks were silly prices but almost worth it for the live band and chinese John Lennon covers....