Stepford wife

An Apology before I begin. It has taken me a long time to get around to publishing this one, so it is about a week out of date. Also some of the photos have been taken with a mobile phone so the quality is not good at all. Sorry!

Dare I speak too soon... the weather seems to be changing. It does not seem quite as humid as previous days. My face no longer has that red sheen, and my hair seems to be much more controllable, no longer do I look completely like a wild woman... but nor do I really look like a Stepford wife, all groomed, slim and boutiqued. But having just had a 5 and a half hour spectacular lunch comprising of loads of my favourite sushi, lobster, prawns etc in a swanky hotel, I think I almost qualify. I met up with a friend, Bridget, from my life at Calwell High in Canberra from some 17 years ago. Bridget, like me, is currently between jobs so able to do the long leisurely lunch thing, something that we both decided we could get use to if only we could afford to!!

My nose is now pressed up against the windows of my apartment trying to read the name of the container ships that are steaming by, as today is the day that the Bahia Laura is due into port with our container in tow. A bit of a catch 22 as I cannot read the names without binoculars and my binoculars are on the ship! So I just watch them go by, praying that one of them contains my precious load, not that I know where on earth I am going to fit everything once it arrives... I seem to be settling into a bit of a regular routine. A bit of house work (yes that is a bit of a shock to the system) then off to Starbucks to get online to check emails etc. We still do not have internet. It seems that the cables coming into our building cannot support the speed of internet that we requested. So rather than actually telling us this in the first place and giving us the option of down grading or waiting an indefinite period until they could upgrade the cables, everyone just kept doing the typical face saving thing of saying "someone will ring you" which they did but with no answer to the problem. This went on for over a week until eventually the sales man who sold us the package admitted the problem and we agreed to downgrade in order to actually get it on in the house. So now we are booked in to have a technician come around on Monday afternoon, fingers crossed that we can then watch cable TV and use the internet at home. I can tell you that there is only so much Starbucks coffee you can drink in a week and as I have at least 1 visit a day sometimes 2 in order to get internet, I can say that I am pretty much over it all. I have also had to resort to a bit of stair running for exercise as we did not have our resident cards for all the facilities available in our estate. We were told they would take about 2 weeks to be processed and we were very excited when we opened our mailbox last night to find them lying waiting expectantly for us. Now the hard work for me begins. With all the gym facilities and swimming pools, internet in the house (I am assuming that all will go well on Monday) there will be no time at all to do any of the more boring tasks like housework!!!
Of course there is also the shopping to be done. Last weekend we found another plaza within walking distance of the estate, this one is 28 floors of shops, mainly furniture shops with both new and antique Chinese furnishings, a wonderful place to spend an afternoon browsing and imagining what fun it would be to furnish a large apartment with all the beautiful Chinese antiques, from ornate cupboards, heavily carved or stunningly lacquered to simple woven food boxes from monasteries in a past era that would make striking storage pieces. Red, black and gold are the prevalent colours and the smell of old wood, with underlying hints of incense fill our nostrils. Today we made the mistake of going to Causeway Bay to try to sort out mobile phones. Take a memo... try to avoid Causeway Bay and Times Square on the weekend as the crowds are unbelievable. Today being Saturday it was still relatively quiet compared with what I have been told it can be like on a Sunday. I suppose I will have to check it out one Sunday just to see how crowded it can get. As you can see from the photos it is not exactly quiet. Here we found 13 stories of shopping heaven!!! Richard has been given an apple mac by the school and he is having a lot of trouble getting it to sync with his phone so we are trying to sort out either how to get it to sync with the phone that he already has or find another phone that will easily sync with his mac, other than the iphone of course. Here we are back in Starbucks for the second time today as he tries to download some software which will sort out his problem. There is a lot of groaning, swearing and throwing hands in the air, so it does not look like it is going that well.

On Friday night we met up with Sujana, Tim and a friend of Sujana's for dinner in Soho. Soho is set high on the slopes of the surrounding hillsides near Central and is a popular place to go to eat as there are many, many bars and restaurants here. We went to the very popular Elgin Street, to the 'Bistro Manchu' which I have since heard is supposed to be one of the best Chinese restaurants that you can eat at, specializing in food from the north of China. So how to get there... we are of course keen on using public transport wherever possible. But the nearest bus and tube station is down the bottom hill, so it looks like being a long walk up. Oh well, we will at least build up an appetite. However that was not to be, can you believe it... there is actually an outdoor escalator here. In the morning it goes down the hill to transport all the workers who live in this area down to the bus and tube station and then from around 10.30am until just after midnight it runs up the hill to bring both the inhabitants home and the diners to their restaurants. There are twenty escalators and 3 moving side walks here running a total length of around 800 metres with a vertical climb of around 135 metres. The total travel time is about twenty minutes from the bottom to the top, but we did walk a bit while the escalators moved to shorten the trip. According to Guinness World Records, these escalators together form the longest outdoor covered escalator system. What fun, riding an escalator high up above the streets to get to your destination. Of course it is covered to provide some protection from the elements and before we knew it we were at Elgin Street and seated in the restaurant. The food was pretty fabulous, Richard said the lamb was to die for, unfortunately the smell of it was enough for me to know it was not going to be my cup of tea...pretty sad considering I am the daughter of a sheep farmer, but lamb is something that I can no longer stomach. After dinner we headed down to a recently opened restaurant called Soho 8 where we had a couple of drinks and did a very good job at sampling their dessert menu.


Our weekend continued with another night out on Saturday night. Again we met some other friends, this time Bridget and John at the Quarter Deck which overlooks Victoria harbour. The restaraunt was located in Fleet Arcade, facilities developed for visiting naval fleets. The menu of course was predominantly sea food, and the food was good. A gentle breeze kept us cool as we chose to abandon the airconditioning and sit by the water. Salty smells of the sea rode the breeze, providing us with a constant reminder of where we were, the neon lights of Kowloon providing the perfect backdrop. There was one extremely tall building being completed, apparently it is over 900m tall. Can you imagine a building that is almost a kilometer high. Now for all you budding physisists out there, perhaps you can tell me how they are able to get the water to the tanks in the top of the building when water only travels up as far as atmospheric pressure will push it and that is only about 14 meters. Also how on earth do you then flush the toilet on the ground floor without blowing the bowl up because of the water pressure of the water coming from the roof, almost 1 km higher than the toilet!!

The evening ended with an introduction to 'The Wanch'. This is a popular place to listen to live music as it is really one of the only venues that offer live music, and the reason that we have ended up here is because John organises the music side in his free time. It was a great bar with some interesting characters. We arrived just at the end of the first band, but in time to listen to an 'all Japanese' band with the lead singer a throwback from the Japanese glam rock era. His singing was not a lot to write home about but his mannerisms were mesmerising. The band itself were good musicians including an excellent harmonica player. A geat way to end the evening and we eventually rolled into bed at around 2am. Oh my god, two nights in a row of not getting in before 1am... it will be the death of me. Could I really be turning into a Stepford wife.