Our trips 2018, part 2

Dear Readers,

It has been a tradition on this blog to take a look back at some of the places we visited last year. In Part 1, we posted photos of places we visited in the second half of 2018. Here are the places we visited in the first half.

Click on the links, where provided to read more about the places of interest. There are usually a series of related posts per location, you can discover them easily in the calendar at the bottom of the post.

In reverse chronological order:

Entrance to Harbor of Lindau, on the shore of Lake Constance in the summer

Red carpet area in St Gallen, Switzerland

Champions League Final in Kiev, Ukraine

Real Madrid scored against Liverpool and went on to win the title 3-1 –  Marcelo, Bale (2 goals – 64′ and 83′), Benzema (1 goal at 51′), Modric and Ronaldo

The Lavra, Kiev (Kyiv), Ukraine

Neues Rathaus at Marienplatz, Munich

Late night Ginza, Tokyo, in April

Zhengyang Gate, Qianmen, Beijing – 正阳门箭楼

Wanchai, Hong Kong in April

WYK, Hong Kong

Wadi Rum, Jordan

Dead sea resort, Jordan

Petra, Jordan

Oslo, Norway where we spent the beginning of the new year

Nobel Peace Center, Oslo

Let’s see where we will go in 2019.

Our trips 2018, part 1

Dear Readers, Happy 2019 !

It is a tradition on this blog to take a look back at some of the places we visited last year. We traveled more in 2018 than 2017, at least in terms of distance traveled. Chris had been to Hong Kong and Tokyo twice and went to the Middle East.

Click on links, where provided to read more about the places of interest. There are usually a series of related posts per location, you can discover them easily in the calendar at the bottom of the post.

In reverse chronological order:

London – Regent Street, an early Christmas for us

Covent Garden, London

Hong Kong  – on Star Ferry in October

Taipei, Taiwan

The new Eslite – 誠品行旅

The old Grand – 圓山大飯店

Beitou –  just outside Taipei – 少帥禪園

Los Angeles – wedding at NeueHouse in Hollywood

Col de la Croix de Fer, 2067m in the Alps, France

Albertville, France

Tokyo, in June – Hie Shrine 日枝神社

First half of 2018 in our next post.

 

 

Art Basel 2018, Hong Kong

I (Chris) was in Hong Kong and managed to catch the Art Basel 2018 show on its last day. The show was hosted at the Hong Kong Exhibition Center on the Wanchai harbourfront.

Sis had complimentary tickets and access to the VIP lounge, where we had a nice simple lunch there.

A Swiss sponsor’s hardware were used to show the international scope of the organizer. AP had a booth serving champagne in the VIP lounge.

My favorite of the show is this video-on top of-a painted/printed piece. It depicts a mountainous megacity with high-rise buildings and construction cranes, and the street traffic is animated. Hong Kong is a bit like, that and Rio too. It is both futuristic and realistic.

The other favorite and also a crowd-pleaser is this sheet of sheer woven material that is ever so light, and it floats and undulates gently following the constantly varying air currents supporting it.

Cindy Sherman was there.

Timeless ?

The pieces below are those that caught my eye.

Live participant at this installation. She was cleaning the dishes.

I did not get the names, there were mobs in front of most pieces.

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Nice miniatures of Hong Kong street scene.

Papier-mache with chinese ink characters

There were even organized tours. Somehow I doubt that it was organized by Art Basel.

I was curious to hear what the tour guide/commentator was explaining to those kids about a painting full of photorealistic gemstones and pearls framed by a bright gold-hued frame.

We did not stay long because there were so many people. Art Basel 2018 was a spectacle and a marketplace.

 

Breakthrough Book Gallery 突破書廊, Hong Kong

When I(Chris) was in Hong Kong during Easter, I came across this bookstore.

Breakthrough (突破) was a magazine that was published between 1973 and 1999. When I was in secondary school in Hong Kong, I was a school librarian and flipped through it. The history of the magazine, the social movement and its activities are described here.

Breakthrough is a non-profit, non-governmental organization dedicated to the education and development of youth culture with a christian viewpoint.

As you enter, you are greeted by this sign which says “re-experiencing the temperature of paper books”.

The organization’s mission is to develop, via media and interpersonal relationship, the city’s youth so that they become leaders of the 21st century.

They are a publisher of chinese language books.

The Book Gallery located near Jordan is one of three bookstores run by the organization.

These are key rings made with resin which resembles the signs used by old Hong Kong taxi and minibus (I think), particularly the font and colors.

Can be custom made with your phrase.

There is a coffee bar with barista service.

They also stocked a small collection of card games and board games, some of them translated from English or German.

The gallery like most shops in Hong Kong is small but it felt open and comfortable. A nice place to rest your feet and browse.

It is rare in Hong Kong to find an establishment like Breakthrough that is doing something meaningful and not entirely commercial.

The Police Married Quarters 元創方, Hong Kong

Almost forgot this post which we wrote earlier in the year.

We visited The former Hollywood Road Police Married Quarters, now renamed PMQ 元創方 in Sheung Wan, Hong Kong earlier this year. The buildings and grounds have been turned into a landmark for the creative industries. It is truly a great place to wander and shop as well as to soak up some local history and creative culture.

The history and preservation efforts of the site are well researched and documented here officially. Much of the writings below have been taken from various Hong Kong government sources.

In 1951, the site started as the Hollywood Road Police Married Quarters — the first dormitory for Chinese rank and file police officers. The site included 140 single rooms and 28 double rooms, with a semi-open design that allowed greater interaction between the residents. The site had been vacant since 2000.

The two buildings have been refurbished and upgraded for new uses. Residential units have been converted into design studios and shops, offices for creative enterprises and lodging for visiting designers. The buildings of PMQ are of modern style, feature a simple and clean appearance with a more utility approach for the design of space and form. This style emerged in the early 1950s when there was a great increase in population, resulting in great demand in buildings which required fast and efficient construction.

In order to cope with this, the design of building aimed at meeting the minimum requirement and standard which resulted in a simple and functional design. Buildings of this style are mainly built of strictly utilitarian reinforced concrete with flat roofs with minimal decoration.

This place turns out to be the childhood homes of both Hong Kong ex-Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying and his predecessor Donald Tsang.

When the government was going to auction the land, conservationists launched a campaign, citing social historical values embedded in the buildings and the fact it was once the site of Hong Kong’s first government school offering Western-style education.

Given that nearly HK$600 million of public funds has been spent on its renovation, PMQ is seen as a major test case on how Hong Kong conserves and revitalises historic buildings.

We thought about Common Ground in Seoul (see post here) – which is also a cool place for locals and tourists to socialize and shop.  Common Ground is more commercial while PMQ is more artsy – perhaps it can afford to be so as some of the tenants are sponsored.

PMQ’s mission statement says it wants to nurture the best design entrepreneurs in town, put them on the path to commercial success and become a popular destination for tourists and locals in its own right.

On the ground and first floors, there are fancy eateries and established designers and retailers like Vivienne Tam and G.O.D. Having known designer names on the premises is vital to the sustainability of the whole project, not just because of the higher rent that they pay, but also their crowd-pulling power.

We rested our feet with a few drinks at the Tai Lung Fung which adopts a certain vintage Hong Kong eatery designs.

The style is before our time and we cannot tell if it is accurate but it looks authentic.

 

Highly recommended.

The Eslite Spectrum 誠品生活, Hong Kong

We were visiting Hong Kong during the Christmas period. One store that we went to multiple times on this trip is The Eslite Spectrum store in Star House星光行, Tsim Sha Tsui.

Its location just happened to be near the places that we were visiting and it is just a nice place to have a coffee while waiting for friends.

Not only it sells Chinese and English books and magazines, it is a full-fledged lifestyle store.

Hong Kong is very much filled with designer boutiques, department stores, malls packed with brand names along side tiny mom-and-pop shops, and even pop up stores. Eslite spectrum is a big bookstore with smaller stores/stalls/counters inside.

On its website, it says “visitors can browse their way through the store’s inspiring reading landscape to explore and create their own version of the good life.”

Mixing books and magazines with other lifestyle products is a current global retail trend – a bazaar selling books side by side with eye glasses, stationary, bags as well as house plants, cameras and even organic groceries.

Farm direct.

Wooderful Life sells a range of small wooden figurines. There is a fun display of scenaries with moving figurines.

One can choose pieces to build a scene, including battery-powered base and magnetic pieces which move around the base.

The cafe in Eslite Spectrum is rather small. Local old fashion metal shutters are used as decoration. It looked like the decoration is put there to hide an unsightly column – after all, the building is at least 40-plus years old.

While in Tokyo, we went to the T-site “bookstore” in Daikanyama by Tsutaya which has a similar idea (see post here). It had the most gorgeous space for a coffee shop in a bookstore. Tsutaya has just opened their first bookstore in Taiwan (January 2017). Eslite will have some serious competition.

Eslite Bookstore was established in 1989. The first shop was located in Dunhua South Road, Daan District, Taipei, with a focus and emphasis on art and humanities-related books.

It was the first to set up a 24-hour bookstore in Taiwan at its Dunhua store and later in Hong Kong, attracting lots of night-time readers.

Freeze-dried fruits, vegetables and even shitake mushrooms – we bought a huge jar of it.

In Hong Kong, the first Eslite bookstore opened in Causeway Bay in 2012. This 3-storey store in Star House opened in 2015. It stocks 200,000 books and 80,000 lifestyle items.

Eslite as a brand is branching into the hotel and home interior businesses – specializing in warm, modern and sophisticated spaces for living and reading. Love it.

Objection! Protest by Design at Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein

IT and I visited the Vitra Design Museum at Weil am Rhein in April 2016. It is a beautiful, well-designed (duh), starchitect-built campus – more about this place in future posts. From 26.02 – 29.05.2016, in a free-standing gallery next to the museum,  the exhibition titled “Objection! Protest by Design” was held.

The exhibition presented a number of objects that was spawned by the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement 雨傘運動 in Hong Kong that took place between 26 September 2014 and 15 December 2014. Much of what I wrote below came from the Vitra-distributed exhibition guide.

In a reaction to proposed changes in the electoral process in Hong Kong, spontaneous student protests erupted in Hong Kong. The protesters created numerous informal and improvised physical structures, graphic images, digital art, and online networks; protesters used the umbrella that gave the movement its name to protect themselves from the police.

“Broken” by Jonathan Mak. Notice the fractured leg and an off-balance star and the tiny umbrella beneath it.

There were two large “tables” which were overlaid with a large scale birds-eye view of the streets in Hong Kong.

Protesters were highly organized in their occupation of three main heavily trafficked protest sites: Admiralty, Mong Kok and Causeway Bay.

Do click on the map below here to see in details the Admiralty site.

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A large number of installations (barricades, means to cross the expressway median), first aid stations, study areas, press stands and camp sites appeared in the 8-lane expressway and two shopping districts to become voices and means of protests.

The appearance of these installations were recorded and mapped, and shown on these two tables.

Mong Kok

A number of barricades were set up to create a safety zone in order to make a defined space for resting. They were recreated here by 3D printing.

The Lennon Wall was created by students and social workers with Post-Its on a wall of a stair leading from a street up to a pedestrian footbridge in Admiralty.

They invited people to write down their hopes and reasons for staying in Admiralty after the police tried to disperse the protestors with tear gas.

At the end of the occupation, the Wall was taken down and parts of it were preserved.

The exhibition wanted to show how design not only shapes and define products, but can also function as an agent of change in politics, communications and social innovations.

I hope the people of Hong Kong all voted and voted wisely today.

Our trips 2015, part 2

Dear Readers, Happy New Year !

Continuing with our first post of 2016, this post takes a look back at the places we visited in the first half of last year. In 2015, there were 94 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 650 posts. The post that had the highest number of views in 2015 was about our visit to a durian stand in a night market in Malaysia.

Click on links, where provided to read more about the places of interest. There are usually a series of related posts per location, you can discover them easily in the calendar at the bottom of the post.

In reverse chronological order from June:

Berlin, Germany in June to see the Champions League final – a part of the wall

München, Germany in April for work, Asam’s church

Catania, Sicily, Italy during Easter – Teatro Bellini

Taormina, Sicily

Siracusa and Ortigia, Sicily

Half way up Mount Etna and Meditterranean sea, Sicily

Langkawi, Malaysia in January

Hong Kong

Georgetown in Penang, Malaysia

Penang, Malaysia in January

Goodbye 2015, Hello 2016.

 

 

Support True Democracy in Hong Kong

This is dedicated to the protest for true democracy in Hong Kong which is now approaching its peak – October 1.

聲援香港爭取民主普選 !

 

Constant Change by Hong Kong at the Triennale

Hong Kong participated in the Salone d’Onore at La Triennale di Milano. The exhibition is called Constant Change – a theme that is very Hong Kong-esque given its historical and demographics background.

 

 

I was genuinely, pleasantly surprised. The red lamp shades were used in the street market by butchers to make the meat looks redder and fresher. Have not seen them for years  – I really did not expect to see them in a museum in Italy.

 

 

The exhibition has a decent web site, go here and explore. Try the app too.

 

The curator said this about the show:

Hong Kong is a disjointed city. The parts of the city are not coherent, … Hong Kong appears disjointed but when you look at it street by street, it is actually harmonious in its own way. It is just totally different from any city in Europe. Hong Kong is always changing and it changes so fast. That’s why you get inspired. It looks to the future rather than the past, …

 

… When you walk the streets of Hong Kong, you can see what happened twenty years ago and what may happen in the next twenty years. It appears a very modern city, but at same time it’s full of contradictions: it’s crafty and digital, traditional and breaking tradition – all at the same time.

 

The center piece is an immersive multimedia show playback-ed on six giant screens.

 

 

Six synchronized sequences of images ran concurrently in a loop, accompanied by a soundtrack whose propulsive, almost droning rhythm and melody really matched the images and held the piece together. I do not know who made the soundtrack. It was good. I am a Philip Glass fan and generally liked this style of music. I was really glad that the soundtrack sounded new and fresh.

 

 

From time to time, a QR code appears and the viewers are encouraged to scan it with a smartphone which opens an app and provides more content and interactions. I did not try it but it sounded like a good idea (very 21st century !).

 

 

They served visitors instant coffee in little cups. They had a reason for doing it but I forgot …  White letters and words on the floor reproduce those signages found on Hong Kong’s streets.

 

 

The multimedia show is bookended by poster art by local artists and examples of work created by local design craftsman – zinc metal boxes for letters, mahjong tiles, etc.

 

 

It says “Not, Perfect”.

 

 

The audiovisual sequences featured the famous Star Ferry which shuttles between Hong Kong Island and the tip of the Kowloon peninsula. The ships are bi-directional – they do not have to make a U-turn after docking.

 

 

Growing up in Hong Kong, I travelled on those ships thousands of times and remember those chairs really well. The wooden back support, hinged in the middle between the front and back legs, can be tilted to a different position. Depending on the direction of the sailing, the seated passengers can all face forward and do not have to travel backwards.

 

 

“Change is the only constant. That is perhaps the most forthright statement – trite as it may seem – to describe Hong Kong.”

 

Hong Kong cuisines in miniatures

My cousin J is the proud owner of these three sets of miniatures of Hong Kong cuisines. Since I have been posting pictures of real food here for a long time (for example, 2M* dim sum lunch), how about some plastic food for a change.

Dim sum, first.

They are all placed in a display case – there was nothing to indicate the scale unfortunately. Unlike those displayed in thw windows of Japanese restaurants which are life size (or even bigger to impress potential customers) – trust me, these are indeed very small.  Of course, the dim sum cart and the girl are not made to the same scale as the dim sum.

Other than the teacups, the bamboo baskets are most convincing.

Traditional banquet – 11 main course dishes, 1 dessert, 1 plate of oranges. Notice the folded napkins. Details everywhere.

The menu written in cursive chinese is impressively miniaturized and it is legible. You can use it to figure out the dishes.

The roast pork and roast chicken look a bit burnt.

Hong Kong-style cafe. Afternoon snack menus.

Check out real examples of these casual dishes at a congee and noodle shop that we visited in 2011.

Breakfast menu. The clay pot rice with pork chop and fried egg is obviously misplaced.

Ok. People, you must think I have nothing better to post.

I am getting hungry …

Casa Lisboa @ Hotel LKF, Hong Kong

After Macau, we had another chance to enjoy Portuguese food.  My sister’s friend – MW- invited us to dine at this restaurant on the 8th floor of the Hotel LKF, which is in the epicenter of Lan Kwai Fong area.  As several lots on D’Aguilar Street is under construction, new bars and restaurants have opened on Wyndham street above and the hotel provides a direct passage between the two levels.  It was a Friday night and the bar/club scene was in full swing; people were hanging out on the streets effectively merging the bars and restaurants into one big party.

The food was great and it was not meant to be a fusion with local flavors.  I would say it was better than Litoral in Macau (see earlier post).  We had clams in garlic, white wine sauce. Garlicy, finger-licking good.  Grilled prawns …

The obligatory Bachlau dish –  I don’t remember what it was called and did not care much about it.  Nevertheless, it was done well as I can imagine it being oily and heavy, which it was not.

The roasted suckling pig is one of the best I have ever had.  Its skin is crunchy and the meat melted in the mouth. And you do not have to order it ahead of time unlike Litoral.  It was unavoidably a case of cholesterol overload.

The young chef, Martinho is from Portugal and had won various prizes in Europe before starting out in Hong Kong a few months ago.  He was very friendly and came over several times.

Dessert:

Shiro @ Pacific Place, Hong Kong

Our second last meal in Hong Kong was eaten at Shiro in Pacific Place.  It was raining so we did not want to wander the streets looking for a restaurant. Shiro exudes a modern Japanese ambiance – mirrors with a repeating Japanese-y motif and cured-ribbed walls.  Nice bar, too. Must be packed on a weekday lunch time.

Tiny sushi conveyor.  But we sat at a proper table.

We started with a snow crab-seaweed salad with poached egg)

Then, grilled O-toro maki (grilled outer layer, topped with a tiny gold fleck, chopped otoro underneath and inside) – one of the best creative maki I have had.

Avocado smoked eel maki (right)

Pan-fried tenderloin beef with French mustard sauce.  Not bad.

Sea urchin and seafood fried rice

They also have a great-looking website – Shiro.

Food paradise: home-cooked feast

My young auntie C and her husband KK invited us over to her home for lunch before our return to Europe.  I vaguely remember visiting their home in the 80’s.  Surprising for Hong Kong, the surrounding areas have not changed much at all.

All the dishes were cooked by C and her domestic help while I believe KK made the dumplings from scratch.

First up was a soup made with pork, mushroom, lotus roots, and other good stuff.  For those not familiar with Chinese soups, a majority of them are clear and broth-like.  C’s version is not clear due to the lotus roots but it is not thick like western soups.  Tasted fantastic and no MSG for sure.

Next, we had “Swiss” chicken wings.  We wondered about the origin of the name, but in practice it was made with a marinate of sugar and thick soy sauce.

The other dishes were Malaysian style curry beef brisket (coconut-y and tender), steamed bean shoots (green and light), freshly wrapped dumplings (when you make your own, you would know what meat is used inside), and waterchestnut steamed minced pork (forgot to take a snapshot but it was a treat for my sister).

The pièce de résistance is the steamed fish served in traditional style – ginger, scallion with oil and light soy.  Cantonese and Hongkongers (who live by the South China seas) pay top prices in restaurants for fresh seafood done this way, hence the wall of display tanks in front of the seafood restaurants. Northern Chinese do not eat much fish and tend not to savor the delicate taste.  This steamed fish is one of the best ones I had in recent memories – thick and firm (but not tough) white flesh without too many bones.

To finish, C made steamed milk with ginger juice.  She taught us how to make it too –  the tricky part is to make it congeal as it cools.  I will try the recipe using Swiss milk.

翠華餐廳 Tsui Wah Restaurant

Tsui Wah 翠華 is the second restaurant that is worth a mention for its quality, price, and inventiveness.  It is one of the best in a class of restaurants that is similar in spirit to a US diner.  These restaurants serve all kinds of food, local HK style, Chinese regional, “Western”, Northeast (Japan and Korea) and Southeast (Vietnam, Thai, Malaysian) Asian dishes are listed side-by-side on the menu.  Tsui Wah is in fact a popular local chain that is trying to appeal to tourists, and apparently many Japanese visitors come to the restaurant.

On this visit, we ate most of the evidence quickly, so I only have two pictures of what we ordered.  IT ordered wontons, fish-tofu balls and noodles in a fish soup.  Sue had a pasta dish that looked and tasted ok.  I had their Hainanese chicken rice set meal – unlike all the others I had tried, they de-bone the chicken – this is unique.  Unfortunately, my portion was a bit overcooked so the chicken while boneless was a bit rubbery.

We went to the branch near Temple street on the Kowloon side.  It is located one block from the night market and this brightly neon-lit spot got busier as it got later.  Each of our meals including drinks (no alcohol) costed less then USD10 – great value and lively ambience.

On the HK side, a branch of it is located near Lan Kwai Fong (Tsui Wah’s rainbow-colored sign is on the left) and next to Wong Chi Kee (see earlier post about WCK, sign with green color background).  It is across the street from the venerable Yung Kee (Michelin 1-star, not visible in this picture).  My mom who used to work in Central took me to Yung Kee for lunch on many Saturdays when she worked half days.

黃枝記粥麵店 Wong Chi Kee Congee & Noodle Shop

On this trip, two restaurants are worth a special mention – they are both inexpensive, reliable, open at all hours, and make an effort to produce a best-in-class dish.  They are well-known locally and I am now a fan too.  The first is 黃枝記粥麵店 Wong Chi Kee Congee & Noodle shop (WCK), the other is 翠華餐廳 (Tsui Wah)  which I will cover in a later post.

Cantonese egg noodle with dried shrimp eggs, soup on the side (lo mein)

WCK is famous mostly for its noodles – they have a long essay on its heritage of making Cantonese style noodle (since 1946) printed on their paper placemat.  On this visit to HK, I noticed every brand tries to tell a proud story about its historical past and heritage to some old-fashioned values and time-tested know-how in making the product … now wonton noodle too.

We ate at WCK’s shop in Macau which is located in Senado square.  WCK has branches in HK.

Pork in stir-fried soft noodles (yee mein), notice a bit of yellow leek, chinese black mushroom and red pepper in the noodle

Wonton soup – no MSG, and less clear than those I had in the past (probably full of MSG)

Seafood congee

A second plate of  lo mein with marinated beef brisket and tendons.  Great with chili sauce.

This is basic Hong Kong style lunch food at its best – both quality and price.

Flower Market part 2: Street Food 年宵花市之小食篇

Market + around New Year + lots of people + night time + winter + in a park + Hong Kong = ?

Of course, it is street food.  Not as much as I expected but they were there.  Since no two stalls sold the same kind of food, I suspect they were tightly regulated by the organizer.  If you want to see the flowers sold at the market, click here to go back to the previous post.

I know many of the items on offer, deep fried fish balls, stuffed peppers, stuffed eggplant, sausages, chicken nuggets …  As you will see, most are either deep-fried or made spicy in a curry-chili sauce.  We sampled a few of the offerings, including Korean charcoal-grilled marinated squid. The flavors were all bright and big – instant gratification – the virtues of street food.  Too bad they do not sell beer on the grounds.

Curry-flavored stewed whelks (no, we did not try this).

Deep-fried fermented tofu cubes – known even locally as stinky tofu – and indeed they had a sharp odor.  Yes, we all ate one each – it was good.

Hot and sour rice threads from Chongqing – I never saw it so I had to try.  Sue and Sis were not impressed and did not bother.  It was nothing special.Deep-fried battered turnip strips.  They were fried in a wire-basket and come out like little oily cupcakes.  No thanks.

Takoyaki (Japanese style grilled octopus balls) nope, not impressed.  Takoayki is essentially a ball of pancake mix with bits of octopus, cooked in a hot iron plate and eaten with mayonaise and some herbs.  Little sticks are used to turn the little balls so that they are evenly grilled and not burnt.  Vendors on the streets of Tokyo flip each octopus ball on a rack at super human speed – as soon as the last ball on the rack is flipped, he has to go back and flip the first ball – it was fun to watch.

Fresh squeezed sugarcane juice.  Some of the juice was bottled and sold after it has been warmed.

Lunar New Year Flower Market: part 1 年宵花市

We visited the Chinese New Year evening flower market at Victoria Park 维园年宵花市 in Hong Kong.  This type of market or fair is an annual tradition in Southern China – 行年宵.  I remember lugging a peach blossom tree home with my Dad many years ago at such a market.  The practice is similar to the Christmas tree tradition except these peach blossom tree has no leaves except flower buds.  Red ribbons and packets are hung from the tree.  If the timing is done right, pink flowers emerge on New Year’s day and continue for a week or so.

Families buy the plants for decoration at home, a week or so before Chinese New Year. There are several traditional plants that are required items for a proper CNY decoration: peach blossom tree (above), four season kumquat shrubs (below), and Chinese daffodil 水仙花 (Narcissus tazetta, top picture).

More Chinese daffodils 水仙花.

The bulbs of daffodil are often carved so that the leaves and flowers grow into fanciful shapes – crab claws 蟹爪水仙.  I have seen these daffodils with short stems before but don’t see any resemblance to crab claws.  The white stuff in the middle is wet cotton wool.

Orchids are not traditional flowers for the new year.  But I saw a lot of them in the market.  Also common is the plum blossom tree.

I do not remember this type of orange-colored fruit being a traditional CNY plant – don’t even know its name. The outside has a nectarine-like texture but there are one or more protrusions from its round body.  Odd looking fruits, if you ask me.

The green towers were made with mini fortune bamboos 富貴竹, lots of them. By the way, fortune bamboo is not related to bamboo but a kind of dracaena plant (Dracaena sanderiana) originally from Africa.

Nahm @ Elements, Hong Kong

Nahm is the first restaurant we went to on this trip to Hong Kong.   My sis took us there, it was convenient and the line was not too long.  Indeed, our trip started on a high note, this restaurant is highly recommendable.

I regretted not taking my camera with me since the food was not only tasty but beautifully presented.  We started with a drink from a freshly opened coconut, and had sauteed lamb rack with basil, green peppercorn; deep-fried soft shell crab roll with spinach, mango, avocado in orange caramel sauce.  This picture of their grilled squid salad in toasted seasame, garlic dressing below was found online – we had the same dish and it was delicious.  Unlike regular calamari rings (that are formed by chopping across the body), these were formed by slitting open the body longitudinally and pushed down to open up the rings.

I just discovered that this vietnamese/thai restaurant, belonged to a group that is associated with New York’s Laurent Tourondel restaurants.  In fact, the same NY restaurants – BLT steak, Blue Smoke,  Craftsteak – have their counterparts in HK.  Interesting business strategy – when you have a successful formula (marketing concept and tried-and-tested menu) in one world city, clone the whole package in another world city.  Pictures of the restaurant below were found online.

Check out their web site – Nahm – a short clip of a soundtrack will be play when you visit the site – it turned out to be one of my favorite tracks – Surround me with your love (mental overdrive mix) – I got mine  from Hotel Costes 6.  Someone put the track up on youtube with images of Hotel Costes CD :

Night views over Hong Kong

I just spent a 2-week vacation in Hong Kong (four days were actually spent in neighboring Macau). It has been a long while since I had 2 weeks off.  More remarkable is the fact that I spent Chinese New Year there – I cannot remember when was my last CNY in HK. The highlights of this trip are mostly food-related as we have been so deprived of Asian cuisine in Switzerland. So, expect more food porn in the near future.

To kick off, I will share some views of Hong Kong central taken from my friends –  V & B’s balcony.  Their building is halfway up one side of Victoria peak on Hong Kong island and they are on the 26th floor (if I remember correctly).  It must be a great place to watch fireworks over the harbor. All these photos were taken by my tiny Canon S90 without a tripod, not bad.

In the photo above, from left to right, the third tallest building in HK – Central Plaza (78 floors; ranks 11th tallest in the world – green-blue kights),  the second tallest – Two International Finance Center (IFC2, 88 floors; 7th tallest worldwide), and fourth tallest – Bank of China (72 floors, IM Pei) are clearly in view. Only the tip of the tallest building in HK is visible in a distance between Central Plaza and IFC2, the International Commerce center (ICC) is located on the Kowloon side – with 108 floors and ranks 4th tallest in the world.

In this photo below, you can just see Ocean Terminal, the old Star Ferry site and the Cultural Center on the Kowloon side. On the island side, the Standard Chartered Bank building, HSBC headquarters (Norman Foster) and Cheung Kong Center (62 floors, Cesar Pelli) are prominent.

Looking straight down at the streets at Mid-levels.

Xmas lights are still on !

Central Plaza changes its color continuously.