And so, to Hong Kong

We flew to Hong Kong on Emirates Airlines by way of Dubai. It was a long flight but an interesting one.

We had a wonderful room reserved at the Renaissance Harbour View Hotel in the Wanchai District of Hong Kong. We had stayed there several times before when Sky was little, so it felt like home.

We had a "Club Level" suite, which gave us access to the Club lounge with it's free breakfast and all day refreshments.

The boys loved it, though we eventually started eating breakfast in the hotel's cafe because it had such a big buffet.

I liked it either way.

This is a view from the Club lounge. The tall building is the International Finance Center. It wasn't there when we left Asia for France. In fact, the jut of land on which it stands was still the sea when we lived in Hong Kong.

We had a wonderful view from our room.

It overlooked the Wanchai Star Ferry terminal ...

... and the line of taxis there.

We spent much of our first day in the hotel pool, but by the second day, the skies had darkened.

Up went typhoon signal 8, during which everyone is advised to stay indoors.

The typhoon just misssed Hong Kong.

It was pretty windy for a while. We rode out the storm in our room.

As the typhoon signal dropped back to 3 and then to 1, we ventured outside.

It was still raining, but not enough to keep us from ...

... eating sushi! The boys love those sushi restaurants in which the food passes on a conveyor belt. There are many of them in Hong Kong. This one is part of a chain called Genki Sushi. Genki means "healthy" or "happy" in Japanese.

Later we went out to find a barber to cut the boys' hair. True was suspicious of the place we picked. Sky insisted that we tell the hair-cutters that he and True weren't girls.

A lot of True's hair came off. It wasn't a bad cut, but he didn't like it. I had to do some remedial snipping with a pair of nail scissors in the hotel bathtub later on.

The next day, the weather cleared ...

... and we finally set off to see apartments. The boys were troopers. They stuck with Anna and saw a dozen or more. We finally settled on their favorite one.

We had an interesting meal in a Wanchai restaurant we picked from the street.

It turned out to be a Sichuan hot pot restaurant. It was delicious and fun.

Even True liked it.

The days went by. We watched a flotilla of boats moving through the harbor, apparently preparing for celebrations marking the July 1 anniversary of Hong Kong's handover to China.

It was fun to watch. There were dozens of boats.

We went to the computer district and then to the mobile phone district, both in Kowloon. We walked around Tsim Sha Tsui (it took me years to be able to pronounce that correctly and I still have trouble sometimes).

We went to eat at a restaurant advertising pork cartilage noodles, among other things. The price, 35 Hong Kong dollars, is about $4.50.

It was a bright, clean place.

The boys and I fooled around while we waited for our food.

The restaurant was a strange mix of Japanese, Chinese and vaguely European dishes. It cast itself as something of a health food restaurant.

The cartilage, apparently, came from Kagoshima Japan. As you can read above, it reduces "winkles." Elmer Fudd would appreciate that.

The boys ordered these foot-long hot dogs. I never saw foot long hot dogs in France.

I had Malaysian curry, which was delicious and came with a big wobbly piece of beef cartilage!

The boys' hot dogs arrived.

But they were disappointed to find that the dogs didn't taste much like they do in Europe or the United States. They said it was the Asian mustard.


All in all, it was a successful week. Anna and the boys left for the U.S. and I moved out of our big comfortable room back to my little 8 x 7 cubicle in the North Point district. The people at the front desk were glad to see me.

Though my room is small, it, too, has a great view, which you can see above. The weather, meanwhile, has turned lovely.