Starting 2014 in Hong Kong

So I guess we are almost back up to date and I can talk about more recent goings on!  We travelled back to Hong Kong on the 4th of January from Manchester via Heathrow.  We were travelling on the new BA A380, with the best discovery being a storage cabin next to the window seats - small things keep us happy!

First stop once we returned was for Dim Sum, which I think Hannah had missed.  One of the best in Hong Kong is Din Tai Fung, which is in fact Taiwanese Dim Sum.  Sunday evening was therefore spent trying to stay awake by eating lots of food!

credit hannah for the instagram!

We then struggled through a whole 5 days at work, with jet lag to battle and Hannah remembering what it's like after nearly 2 months away.  I won't bore you with any other details - sadly work is work the world over.

Once we made it to the weekend, on Saturday we went for some more Dim Sum (I told you Hannah really missed it!).  This time it was to Tim Ho Wan.  This is the cheapest Michelin Star restaurant in the world I believe, and it's certainly very good and a regular stop on our Hong Kong visitor tours.

we ate it too quick for me to get a picture!

In the evening we headed to Beer Bay, one of the cheapest bars in Hong Kong and with a great view to watch the world go by near the ferry piers.  Hannah is also a big fan due to their provision of Strongbow.

watching the world go by

In the evening we headed to Chungking mansions.  This can only be described as a crazy place - and one I did not know much about until I read this BBC article.  It's one building that looks like all the floors could be full of apartments or office blocks, but it turns out to be pretty much full of India restaurants and small hostels.  The ground floor is packed with people selling you mobile phones, Indian snacks and sweets and groceries and then you queue for the elevators to various floors to enter the rabbit warren of restaurants. Thankfully we had a guide who had been before and their selection was very good, so we enjoyed a tasty curry sat in our own little private room.  One of the other strange things is that to comply with a law (don't ask me which one) these are registered as "members only" clubs so we had to collect a special card from the ground floor that gave us "VIP membership" just to be let in!  

Tasty curry in our private room

After the curry we could not walk past all the sweet shops on the ground floor without trying some.  The colours in the photo are not changed with the joys of instagram - they really are that bright.  However, if you want to eat lots of different flavours of sugar and deep fried goodness then you can't go far wrong.

luminous sugary deserts

 We'll no doubt be adding Chungking Mansions to our tour options for any visitors we have - it's another thing you would never expect to find in Hong Kong!

Home alone in Hong Kong

At the end of October Hannah headed back to the UK for a couple of months which left me home alone in Hong Kong!  

To keep myself busy I joined some meetup groups, one to play volleyball and one for running!  The people I met ranged from those who had always lived in Hong Kong through to people here on holiday or business who just wanted to run to see the city.  The weekly run was up the peak - a great way to remind yourself quite good the view is of the Hong Kong skyline at night.  Doing a bit more running also dragged me out on a Saturday morning to see the countryside of which there is more of in Hong Kong then I would ever have believed before I got here.

Morning view from Jardines lookout during a run

There is a bus trying to squeeze through there somewhere!

Night time view from the peak

Hannah and I don't really cook in Hong Kong and that didn't change just because I was on my own! Between local takeaways and cooked food markets I was kept full of tasty food.  I did occasionally eat cereal in the evening, but that was about as close to cooking as I got!

Curry sauce, Rice and deep fried breaded pork - what more could you want

Cooked food market Thai!

Towards the end of the time along I met up with our friends Tim and Ruth for a beer in Tin Hau.  This is an area of Hong Kong island that until then I had never been to (it's crazy quite how many places there are to visit all close together, some of which you just go past for months at a time).  They obviously thought that my takeaway diet was not doing me any good and cooked me my only home cooked meal during my time alone.  Tim is a very good chef and our Sunday dinner of steak was tasty!

Me, Tim and Ruth

Mmmmm, home cooked steak

December also was time for Hong Kong's biggest music festival, Clockenflap.  It's held on an open area just on the edge of the water in Kowloon.  I went on the Saturday and got to see Franz Ferdinand, the 1975 and Nile Rodgers (if you have never heard of Nile Rogers, look him up - he was involved in or wrote so many songs!) The setting was the best I have ever seen for a music festival - great view of the skyline as the sun set - this was the same location as the beer festival last year.  Eventually it is due to be built into a more permanent cultural centre including a theatre etc. but I think it would be best left for these events!

The main stage

view back from the main stage

And I'll leave you with a few more Hong Kong photos from the 2 months.  Other than that all I did was work hard and miss Hannah really (awwwww)!

View from our flat - that's a very blue sky for Hong Kong

Hong Kong Taxi

Star Ferry

Christmas decorations in our local shopping centre

Australia adventures (includes a wool shop and yarn bombing!)

In October we headed down under to Australia for a week visiting Sydney and Melbourne.  For those of us that had never been to Asia until a year ago, Australia is still a surprisingly long way away - another 9 hour flight from Hong Kong.

Our first stop with Sydney.  Having made our way from the airport after a few hours of plane sleep, we walked down to see if the view really is as good as it looks in all those pictures and videos you see.  I can confirm it is - the harbour with the bridge and opera house mean it really is a very impressive.

We spent our Saturday walking round and seeing the sights including a "noodle festival" taking place just by our hotel - guess they put that on to make us feel more like we were in Hong Kong.

Sunday was the type of sunny day that makes a postcard.  We decided to walk from Coogee beach up to Bondi beach along the coastal path.  You pass lots of different beaches where the beautiful people of Sydney were out enjoying the sunshine (and yes, everyone seems to be beautiful in Sydney!).  We ended the walk at Bondi beach where Hannah went for a quick swim, although it turns out that because Bondi is for surfing all the swimmers are packed into a very small area.  Looking back at these photos the blue sky really stands out - we don't get that in Hong Kong but you don't notice until I sit here and look at the window and compare.

Coogee Beach

Bondi Icebergs

On Monday we had booked a bike tour round Sydney (thanks to Donya, Nic, Jenny and Danny - this was a wedding present) It was great to be shown round by a tour guide and see some other sights, as well as be shown some of the best places for pictures of the harbour.  We even rode part way across the bridge.  Half way through the tour we got take to a local brew pub - the Lord Nelson Brewery - although having already spent 48 hours in Sydney of course Hannah and I had already sought this out on the Sunday night and were well acquainted with its rather good beer.

bike helmet as proof of some cycling

On Tuesday we headed off to Melbourne - a short 1 hour flight away.  Melbourne is known in Australia as being a city where you can experience 4 seasons in a day and it certainly lived up to it's reputation.  We had sun, rain, hail, wind and that was over a couple of hours.  Melbourne was where we finally had to get some evidence of quite how expensive things in Australia are - a picture from the local Spar of the cost of a chocolate bar should give you some idea.  The recent boom in mining and general success of the Australian economy has meant that it has become a very expensive place to live, although it seems that because wages have risen as well everyone carries on as normal. We spent our time in Melbourne doing lots of walking round including seeing the park where the Grand Prix is held, the obligatory wool shop (I told you there would be wool references) and also the war memorial.  We also got the tram around the city and also out to St Kilda for dinner.  If you every go there then seek out an excellent bar/restaurant called La Roche which was doing "Parma" night - essentially a giant chicken schnitzel covered in ham and cheese.  We also had some very tasty churros.  

Churros!

Expensive chocolate....

Apparently a really good wool shop....

On Friday we headed back to Sydney, staying in a nice hotel at the waterfront on a pier.  Friday night we did we headed down to the Syndey Opera House bar on the waterfront and met up with our friend Ian (some of you may recognise him as also being our star wedding photographer!).  After a beer Ian took us on the ferry to Manly where he lives with his wife Laura and introduced us to a very nice local restaurant for dinner.  They offered to act as our tour guides on Saturday, so we headed off again on the ferry on Saturday morning and after a very nice lunch spent the day relaxing on a beach in Manly.  We went for a wander round Manly where Hannah was very excited to see some yarn bombing.  The evening was then spent in another brew pub - the Four Pines - highly recommended.

The beach in Manly

Yarn bombing 1

Yarn bombing 2

Four Pines - tasty food and beer

And with that it was home time on Sunday morning from another adventure!  Great to see another place, get to see sights we thought we would only ever see on TV or in postcards, relax and enjoy good food and beer and catch up with friends - a good combination for any holiday :-)

Crazy Rain, Bubble Tea and Beers

In the spirit of catching up on this blog, I (Hannah) found this draft post I wrote but never posted... so enjoy! Back soon with more recent happenings :-)

Still catching up.... 22nd May - The day of Crazy Rain. 

We went to bed one night as normal then about 4am we were woken by roaring thunder and rain battering the windows. (In Hong Kong we have a government department - the Hong Kong Observatory, who provide awesome weather information all day and all night. Usually it's not that interesting, but as we get into typhoon season we get some good alerts from the app!). I looked at my app and it said 'Red Rainstorm Warning' (there's Amber, Red and Black, in order of severity) - ooh exciting, not seen one of those before I thought.

With the crazy rain came crazy lightning; the blinds in our bedroom aren't up to much and it was like a strobe disco, we've never seen anything like it! We pulled the blinds up and tried to film it, but the visibility was so poor due to the intense rain. It started to subside and we tried to get back to sleep when I noticed we were now on 'Black Rainstorm Warning'.

Black rain is even more exciting because it means stay where you are and don't go to work! This signal also hadn't been raised for over 3 years! Given it was 4am I didn't really think it'd still be black when I woke up at 7:30am, but it was..... I looked out of the window and it just looked like bad rain really, nothing like in the middle of the night in any case.

I also didn't expect to see buses running, but there were plenty so I wasn't exactly sure why you were supposed to stay off work. (All schools shut automatically though in black rain). Stephen got an email from HR saying don't come in, but given he we live 10 minutes walk from his office he decided to make a point and go in. He texted me to say yeh it's a bit wet but the MTR was open so I should probably go to work too....

Decided to have a coffee and do a bit of crochet first mind.... 

On the MTR, normally squashed in like sardines.

I got to the office for 9:30, so technically only half an hour late and most people don't rock up till around then normally anyway. It was pretty bad really, the people who mop the floor / provide bags for your umbrellas / work in Starbucks and McDonalds were all working, so why the people that work in the offices couldn't make it in I don't really know. (Yes, some people do live a long way out and genuinely couldn't make it in due to flooding and landslides, but most don't!). Ah well, provided a bit of excitement for a random Wednesday morning anyway.

Onto the Bubble Tea, my latest obsession!

And finally, the beers! Check out this awesome selection we bought in our local Japanese supermarket. They even sell Meantime Lager, and it's cheaper than buying it in London!

Apparently in my draft post I'd added these pictures below but not written anything - have left them in for good measure (+ added captions).

The view from Beer Bay (a little hut by the ferry pier that serves very chip beer with a brilliant view watching the traffic in the harbour).

Sometimes we sit there all night and watch the sun set.

International Finance Centre 2 - Tallest building on HK Island (Bank of China tower in the background).

View from another favourite bar - Wooloomooloo Steak House in Wan Chai, pricey but worth it for that view - normally reserved for when we have visitors).

Same rooftop bar, different angle.