We had an awesome time over the 2008 Christmas and New Year holidays in Hong Kong. Vishanj were the first to land on the 23rd. Their journey from distant Dushanbe is the stuff of legend. For a point-to-point journey that is 4600 km, they traveled a one way distance of 15000 km via Istanbul, Dubai and Singapore!
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A meet-and-greet was organised at the Hong Kong airport express station where vixabs greeted them in a most awesome manner before giving them their personal copies of the FRITE (Folding Reunion ITinErary). They appeared bright eyed and bushy tailed, in spite their 33 hour trip. Brave and strong people!
Later that evening we went to Bo Innovation - a Michelin 2-star restaurant run by HK-celebrity Chef Alvin Leung Jr. The food was awesome. The innovative use of ingredients and their creative combination using new processing techniques resulted in 12 courses of the most exquisite taste. Even though each course was miniscule in quantity, we rolled out of the Wanchai building feeling like stuffed desis.
The next day, shopping began in right earnest - we witnessed visits to the tailor, shoe stores, clothes stores, big stores, little stores, western stores (M&S), chinese stores (Shanghai Tang) and some awesome food at a local dumplings place for lunch, Segafredo for coffee, China Tea Club for tea, and vixabs for dinner.
On Christmas day, we lazed around and checked out the decorations in some buildings and malls before landing up in Lan Kwai Fong for late night drinks. Then Vinoo & Vicky did an awesome sprint to Hong Kong airport to meet and greet Mummy & Papa and get them home.
On Boxing Day, we left rather early in the morning for Hong Kong Parkview. Over there, some of us went to the superstore to get BBQ stuff. The rest of us went to the Tai Tam Country Park to secure a good BBQ site. It was sunny but windy. Some folks walking in front of us had their hat fly away - vix gallantly tried to help them get the hat back but the wind force was so much that it flew away very quickly. Tai Tam Country Park is set in a lush green hilly area with two reservoirs, and several picnic sites and BBQ pits. The girls had prepared several different kinds of veggie BBQ food and we also had marinated chicken with us. The most challenging task of course was to light the fire... Mummy began to give instructions for this and Papa began to follow them dutifully (as he is so well trained to do) and we had a fire raging in no time... in the meantime, the kids began to drink beer (haw! Right in front of Mummy & Papa) and then the food arrived and the marshmallows followed and it was so tasty! The most awesome part of the BBQ was the group sitting at the pit next to ours... they must have belonged to a kennel club - they brought as many as 20 dogs with them. Basically Mummy and Vinoo forgot to eat after that... And lots of skewered food got over-burnt as they lost track of time once they would begin looking at the dogs while cooking their food. Tsk tsk.
We went for a long walk across the country park after our lunch and ended up near Redhill from where we were promptly brought back home in taxis. Then we got dressed and looked lovely and nice and took the star ferry to the Hong Kong Cultural Centre for a traditional Christmas-time performance of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. The ballet was very well performed and we marveled at the dexterity, flexibility and skill of the artistes whenever we could. Of course, we couldn’t do it all the time because we kept falling asleep due to the day's exertion and exposure to the sun. On the way back we were struck by the awesome holiday lighting displays on the buildings that define HK's skyline. We took the mid levels escalator back home, stopping at a Starbucks on the way for late night coffee.
On the 27th the weather changed a little and it became cloudy and we even had patches of rain. This weather stayed with us till the end of the year. And then, on January 1, it was awesomely bright and miraculously sunny again, as if Mother Nature had herself heralded a fresh start to the year.
Over the course of the next few days, we had lot of fun together... We visited lots of places, and ate at many restaurants, and drank lots of tea and coffee and kanji! We loved the awesome time we had at
On another day, we took the cable car from Tung Chung to the Big Buddha (aka the Ngong Ping Buddha). It was awesome because it was so cloudy and foggy and we couldn't see a thing but the cable car knew exactly where to go and did not lose its way. Even the Buddha's statue was obscured by fog till, suddenly, just when we had climbed the 268 steps to the top, the clouds cleared and gave us such a lovely darshan of the Buddha's serene face. We had lunch at Pizza Hut that day before going to the outlet mall in Tung Chung and buying all kinds of stuff. We went to Water Margin for Sichuan food, Zuma for Japanese food. We went to Sabita for rasam and to Mummy for sookhi dal.
And on the 30th we took the Stanley double decker to Repulse Bay for lunch at the Verandah restaurant. The food was good – there was salad and a main course, and there was dessert too. And we had a birthday cake for Mummy. And we had champagne. Mummy liked the cake so much that she didn’t want to eat it… and she didn’t want us to eat any of it too! What a waste! It was only after we promised to take her to a dog show to see nice pups and other pets that she agreed to let us have a bit of the cake!
On the 31st, we had a lot of fun welcoming the new year with our friends - we had Deepti and Yash (who gave us a live performance on his violin) and Poorna, Smriti, Soshima and Suren. Gauri and Rahul were there too and they did a great job with the martini. We talked and talked and ate and ate and on the stroke of the midnight hour, we had champagne. And Mummy cut a cake and we all sang and laughed and had an awesome time.
On another of the days, Mummy-Papa went to the Chi Lin Nunnery and they liked it a lot too. We would begin each day with fruit that Sabita or Mummy would cut for us. We would end each day with lemongrass tea that Vinoo would make for us. And between the fruit and the lemongrass tea, we ate lots, laughed lots, saw lots, drank lots, and had fun lots! Isn’t that right, Puppa and Mommie?!
