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….