February | 2012 | My Hong Kong Blog

Yesterday was primarily my blog learning day. After posting my first blog I didn’t have much time left to go into Central, so I walked down to the local supermarket, which is located in what used to be the famous Repulse Bay Hotel but is now a group of beautiful high-end shops and doctors’ offices, and spent about an hour looking at everything before purchasing what I wanted to make for dinner. Monika has been making breakfast, lunch and dinner, with me cleaning up to try to contribute, but I wanted to make dinner so she could relax a bit. I finally found an oriental black bean sauce for chicken, which was thawing out in the apartment. I also purchased some beef for a future meal, and had purchased pork chops the day before for another meal. Monika has been making the most marvelous meals! I hope I can rise to the occasion…

The walk downstairs from the apartment to the market is fairly easy. I take one elevator to the 3rd level car park, then I walk a short distance, go through a few doors, and take another elevator to the access gate that goes to the shops. I’m still having trouble figuring out which elevators to take when I come up from the bus… Security is amazing. Gates with codes, security officers at all outside doors, etc. They all know I am visiting and are very helpful. Once inside the shop area, I take these beautiful stairs down to the market.

I tried to hide the guys taking wedding photos as much as I could.

Bamboo railed stairs inside Repulse Bay Shops

Oh, I didn’t mention that this apartment building is undergoing major renovations to the interior and exterior. Therefore there is bamboo scaffolding all around the lower exterior, which you will see in the next photo taken from the patio. If I stay in the apartment during the day, there is constant drilling and banging, so yesterday was pretty intense while I was trying to learn to blog! This morning they managed to come through the wall of the room in which I am staying, so I had plaster and stuff all over my bed. Luckily I was not in it at the time!

Jackie Chan's house. The one with green roof.

Here is one of the buses I take to Central. My favorite place to sit is front row on top — my chances of getting car sick increase with every row further back! Hong Kong is often compared to the fjords of Norway. The roads around the island are very curvy, yet there is only one lane each direction with cut-outs for slower vehicles to use (if they are considerate) so others can pass. The most amazing thing is to be in a bus and pass another huge vehicle going in the other direction, expecially as you enter a curve and the fronts of both vehicles stick out and nearly touch! I have no idea how the drivers navigate this terrain, but they somehow manage. I’ll try to take a picture to give you a visual.

#6 Bus to Central. Taken with zoom from patio.

Repulse Bay is exposed to the ocean. When you look at the map, it is the first area you come to when coming in from the ocean. Freighter traffic is constantly visible on the horizon as the enormous ships carry their cargo to the harbor.

Freighter traffic taken from patio, zoom lens.

Here is a shot of Repulse Bay again taken from the patio, between rows and columns of scaffolding. At the very top of the photo is South Beach, which is where Monika and I walked the other day — to give you a sense of its location in relation to RB.

When I lived in HK back in the 60s, I will never forget going to a party with a bunch of sailors down at the building in the foreground. We were on the roof. One sailor was so drunk he thought he was on a float in the water, like the ones you see here. All of a sudden he flung himself off the roof, as if he were just easing himself off a raft and going into the water (see lower left corner of roof), and landed on his back on the sidewalk below, which was about three stories considering being on the roof! I was horrified. I ran all the way from there up to my apartment, which was across the street where you saw the picture of the bus, and up about two hundred steps and then several floors to the apartment and called an ambulance. By the time I got back, the ambulance had arrived and the sailor was already up and refusing to go. I think they eventually forced him into it. But it was really quite a traumatic experience for me at age 17. Ah, memories!!

Until next time….

This is my first ever blog. Hopefully this will be interesting and informative for all who read it. I am visiting Hong Kong for two months. I arrived on Feb. 20 and after about a week of sending emails back home to various people I decided now would be a good time to learn how to blog. I will try to post every day or so to let you know what I’ve been doing and share pictures of my exploits.

I spent the first week in HK trying to familiarize — or should I say RE-familiarize — myself with this amazing city of nearly 8 million people, a far cry from my hometown of Tallahassee with about 250,000! To get a good overview of Hong Kong, check out Wikipedia.

The reason I am in Hong Kong is that I used to live here in the 60s and my school, King George V (KGV, i.e., Cagey Five), is having a reunion. This is also a buying trip for my home and fashion accessories business, YUEN MI PRODUCTIONS. I have been back in touch with my schoolmates since the late 90s and have attended reunions in Sydney (2001), Hong Kong (2007), and Vancouver (2008). The Vancouver one was a Hong Kong reunion and was not limited to KGV alumni, so we got to visit with friends we used to compete against in sports and party with on weekends. For this reunion, they expect about 400 people. I am fortunate to be staying with friends, Gopal and Monika Lalchandani. They live in Repulse Bay, which is on the south side of the island and is where I used to live, so it’s very familiar.

I used to live in the very small apartments just to the right of the brown tower.

I'm currently living in bottom floor far right side of the complex - with huge patio.

In 2007 I stayed with my brother Robin and his wife Boots. They live in the liveliest area of this city: Central. That’s downtown. That’s where most of the action is. And it was a simple matter of walking 100 paces from their flat in “Mid-Levels” to the world’s longest covered escalator that took me down to Central, where I would walk until my feet just about fell off. And it was HOT HOT HOT and HUMID HUMID HUMID. This trip, it is winter and much cooler. The weather has not been very sunny yet, but hopefully that will change soon. From Repulse Bay, I now take a double decker bus to Central, which takes about 20-25 minutes. Not a bad ride. And the scenery is fascinating. I never tire of it.

So in my first week I have taken numerous bus rides, ridden the MTR (subway, rail system) to Kowloon to make a special purchase and also got the soles and heels of my boots repaired while I waited for just 1/2 hr!, taken a purse in to be repaired (now ready; picking up today), shopped at the Stanley Market, walked from Repulse Bay to Hong Kong Country Club which is almost to Aberdeen, walked with Monika from RB to South Beach, had lunch and visited with Boots for 3 hours, had lunch with Robin when he got back from Jakarta, and visited with him for about 2 hours before he had to race off to work, walked miles in Central, and seen about 6 movies. Gopal and Monika love movies, and so do I, and they own a store where they rent videos so they have access to everything imaginable. Saw Hugo the day before the Academy Awards, so that was timely!