Thursday morning.
The T3 warning has been hoisted in the lobby. I've just returned from my walk up the Peak. The sun is shining and it's breezy - why all the fuss? People are scurrying around buying groceries and supplies just in case ...
Day care centres have been closed, and warnings are up all over the Internet.
Severe Typhoon Megi is on its way from the Philippines.
When I opened my computer this morning, there were five emails from Canada asking me if we were okay here in HK. There was also an email from the AWA French conversation group cancelling tomorrow's lunch at a HK yacht club.
Cousin Lou (Toronto) is on his way here from China. He's due to arrive this evening, weather permitting. Wonder if we will be able to dine al fresco with him on Saturday night.
Thursday evening.
Drizzling a bit, but the winds have died down. Is this the calm before the storm? Jeff's on his way home. Time to batten down the hatches. My friend, Hanora, just told me that the concierge in her building is busy waterproofing the lobby. Heavy plastic coating. Masking tape on all the windows. My hairdresser told me that his ceiling leaks and the property manager has been negligent in fixing it. This situation could get interesting.
Good news: the HK Observatory just advised us that there is little chance of Signal No. 8 being raised overnight. Perhaps the worst of the typhoon will pass us by.
More good news: the long-range forecast predicts clear skies by mid-week with maximum temperatures of 24-25 degrees. No need to worry that Helen and Lou will be melting in severe heat.
Strange name of the day: (Mr.) Nose Chan (Program assistant, HK Asia Society)
Friday evening.
We're down to T1. I carried my folding umbrella around all day - a lot of good it would have done had the winds picked up. The storm has changed course and is heading north to Fujian.
Saturday morning.
All storm warnings are off. Business as usual in HK. The harbour is busy, and construction has resumed in full force.
On to the next adventure.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Thursday, October 14, 2010
This is a very small town
Last Wednesday, I began my weekly volunteer assignment at King's College, a high school in the western Mid-levels, about 15 minutes (walking of course!) from our apartment. The goal of the program is to give students a chance to practise their English conversation skills. My group consisted of 8 17-year-old seniors. We had a lot of fun getting to know each other. After they told me their names, I tried to remember them all - it took a few rounds but I finally got it. My ice-breaker was a roll of toilet paper. I passed it around and told each student to take as many squares as he wanted to. Some took one, others two or three. Then I told them that they had to tell that many different things about themselves. What a bunch of chatty guys! Their English skills are very good (the better ones have Filipina maids who only speak English), and they loved ribbing each other. Because the program is during the lunch hour, the kids are allowed to eat while we talk. A lot of the conversation centred around food, and at the end of the session, the boys offered to bring me lunch next week! I will bring egg tarts for dessert. After the program, I took the subway to Causeway Bay ("downtown" where Jeff works), and went to the library to return/pick up books. On my way back to the subway, a young Chinese boy said "Dale?" - it was Michael, one of my King's students! I even remembered his name!
The moral of this story is - foreigners can't assume that they are invisible in HK.
My favourite coffee shop has closed. Oscar's made the best cappuccino that I've had in HK. Unfortunately, business was terrible, so bye-bye. Their downfall was their location - a side street filled with little shops and small local restaurants. Well, there's always Starbucks or Pacific Coffee for those who need a caffeine fix. Speaking of Starbucks, Jeff was on his way to lunch a few weeks ago, with his book in front of his nose. He walked to his favourite Korean restaurant, opened his eyes, and found a Starbucks in its place.
Coffee shops are great places to talk to strangers. This morning, the fellow in line ahead of me was holding a hockey stick! I said "I guess you must really miss Canada!". Turns out he's been living in HK for 15 years (he's originally from Unionville, north of Toronto). He owns a company that manufactures hockey sticks. Their factory is just over the border in mainland China. We talked about the one ice hockey rink in HK (mega ice). He still plays pick-up once a week.
Our neighbourhood dumplings restaurant (Hometown Dumplings) (reminds me of the Yangtze in Montreal) had to move because the building is being torn down (it's only 20 years old, but it will be replaced by a 40-story condo). Luckily, the owners found a new location two doors down. The food is still good and cheap but the atmosphere is definitely more upscale - the original restaurant had old wooden tables and chairs, toilet paper rolls instead of napkins, ancient calendars and menus lining the walls, and a couple of cats running around (I didn't ask why...). The new place has glass and rattan tables, flowered seat covers, clean menus, napkins, and five 50-inch televisions. Same surly staff, but the food is always fresh and delicious.
We hosted our first little dinner party (it's about time, eh?) a couple of weeks ago. Our guests were Ursula and Stephen, our first HK friends. Jeff met them last November at the HK Jewish Film Festival. Stephen's office is across the road from Jeff's and they often bump into each other grabbing a fast lunch-to-go at the supermarket in Jeff's building. Ursula is my walking buddy - we have a standing date to climb the Peak bright and early Thursday mornings. She's also the fashionista who introduced me to shopping in Shenzhen. The dinner (salmon cooked on our George Forman grill, carrot/ginger soup, etc.) was delicious, but at the end of the evening we had lots of dishes to wash by hand - how I miss my dishwasher!
HK celebrated the Mid-Autumn Lantern Festival on September 23rd. We're not exactly sure when autumn officially begins here, but in Canada, Sept. 23rd is the third day of autumn, and mid-autumn falls towards the beginning of November! Lanterns decorated the city for a couple of weeks before the holiday. On Sept. 22nd, we joined thousands of locals in Victoria Park, admiring the decorations and listening to the music.
Good news/bad news: The good news is that our very noisy neighbours upstairs in 29 E have moved out. The bad news is that the new owners are renovating the apartment. We now listen to jackhammers inside as well as outside (an enormous building is going up right next door). It's impossible to find a neighbourhood in HK that isn't being redeveloped.
There's a huge dig taking place on Stanley Street in Central. I think they are replacing the pipes under the street. The construction has displaced the dai pai dongs (outdoor restaurants) that used to line this pedestrian-only block. On Saturdays and Sundays, the construction crew take off, and as you can see by the photo, restaurants pop up again right next to the dig!
Speaking of renovations, I checked out Wing Lee Street a few days ago (blog May 10, 2010). Almost the entire block is covered in bamboo scaffolding and green netting, but there are still signs of life in the middle of the construction. The city has offered to move the residents to public housing at very low rates, but there are still a few who are desperately holding on to their homes.
Jeff and I love to go to museums, temples, and galleries in the summer when it's hot. I've also been to a lot of art fairs and exhibits with friends during the week. The photo on the left was taken at Che Kung Temple in Sha Tin. The young girl brought her pet turtle (turtles are symbols of good luck) to the temple to bless it at the various shrines.
This temple is across the river from the HK Heritage Museum, where we saw a very creative display of social documentary photography.(Photography exhibit)
Last month, Chloe and I went to a Japanese photography exhibit at the HKU Museum and Art Gallery. We also admired the permanent collection of furniture, ceramics, paintings, and sculpture. The chair in the photo on the left has stag antlers for arms! Chloe, Isabel, and I also visited the Tao Hung Museum of Food Culture. We were expecting an explanation of Chinese food - its preparation and presentation. Unfortunately, we got a wax museum of local foods. In the photo, Isabel and Chloe are sitting in front of the fake dim sum lunch! The owner of the Tao Hung group of restaurants collected a lot of junk relating to food and restaurants.
The most interesting item was the old cash register in the photo on the left. It looked like it had been damaged in WW2 (or perhaps earlier than that!). The library in one corner of the room had shelves of note books, and also some paperbacks (in Chinese). None of them seemed to have anything to do with food or restaurants.
A more successful outing was the Edward Burtynsky (member of the Order of Canada) exhibit at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery. Burtynsky's room-sized photographs of industrial landscapes are breathtaking, even the photo of used oil drums!
Well, once again I seem to have had a lot to blog! Jeff and I have covered a lot of ground in Hong Kong, but there's so much more to see.
The moral of this story is - foreigners can't assume that they are invisible in HK.
Coffee shops are great places to talk to strangers. This morning, the fellow in line ahead of me was holding a hockey stick! I said "I guess you must really miss Canada!". Turns out he's been living in HK for 15 years (he's originally from Unionville, north of Toronto). He owns a company that manufactures hockey sticks. Their factory is just over the border in mainland China. We talked about the one ice hockey rink in HK (mega ice). He still plays pick-up once a week.
We hosted our first little dinner party (it's about time, eh?) a couple of weeks ago. Our guests were Ursula and Stephen, our first HK friends. Jeff met them last November at the HK Jewish Film Festival. Stephen's office is across the road from Jeff's and they often bump into each other grabbing a fast lunch-to-go at the supermarket in Jeff's building. Ursula is my walking buddy - we have a standing date to climb the Peak bright and early Thursday mornings. She's also the fashionista who introduced me to shopping in Shenzhen. The dinner (salmon cooked on our George Forman grill, carrot/ginger soup, etc.) was delicious, but at the end of the evening we had lots of dishes to wash by hand - how I miss my dishwasher! 
HK celebrated the Mid-Autumn Lantern Festival on September 23rd. We're not exactly sure when autumn officially begins here, but in Canada, Sept. 23rd is the third day of autumn, and mid-autumn falls towards the beginning of November! Lanterns decorated the city for a couple of weeks before the holiday. On Sept. 22nd, we joined thousands of locals in Victoria Park, admiring the decorations and listening to the music. 
There's a huge dig taking place on Stanley Street in Central. I think they are replacing the pipes under the street. The construction has displaced the dai pai dongs (outdoor restaurants) that used to line this pedestrian-only block. On Saturdays and Sundays, the construction crew take off, and as you can see by the photo, restaurants pop up again right next to the dig!
This temple is across the river from the HK Heritage Museum, where we saw a very creative display of social documentary photography.(Photography exhibit)
Last month, Chloe and I went to a Japanese photography exhibit at the HKU Museum and Art Gallery. We also admired the permanent collection of furniture, ceramics, paintings, and sculpture. The chair in the photo on the left has stag antlers for arms! Chloe, Isabel, and I also visited the Tao Hung Museum of Food Culture. We were expecting an explanation of Chinese food - its preparation and presentation. Unfortunately, we got a wax museum of local foods. In the photo, Isabel and Chloe are sitting in front of the fake dim sum lunch! The owner of the Tao Hung group of restaurants collected a lot of junk relating to food and restaurants. 
Well, once again I seem to have had a lot to blog! Jeff and I have covered a lot of ground in Hong Kong, but there's so much more to see.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Celebrating Jewish New Year in HK
And I didn't have to cook a thing!
Our synagogue, the United Jewish Congregation (UJC), certainly knows how to look after its members during the High Holidays. After services on Erev Rosh Hashanah, there was a festive dinner at the Jewish Community Centre. Unfortunately, services ended late, so we didn't eat until 10 p.m. While we were having dinner, the heavens opened up and we had a T3 downpour. Fortunately, we live around the corner from the JCC. Unfortunately, we were all dressed up and didn't have an umbrella. Jeff, my knight in shining armour, ran home with his briefcase on his head, fetched my flip-flops and a large golf umbrella, and came back to rescue me. While he was gone, I chatted with a woman who has been living here for 20 years. She was afraid to take a taxi home in the rain - I'm not sure how many hours she waited, since the rain did not let up until the next morning! (Yes, we meet all kinds of crazy expats here.)
On the first day of RH, our main challenge was getting used to the different tunes for familiar prayers. Jeff and I kept turning to each other and saying "don't know this tune" or "yay, we know this one!" (We missed Rabbi Weiss and the Narayaver service in Toronto, as well as Mary-Ann, Evelyn, and Richard, our shul buddies.) The service here is Reform, and there's a lot of reading by the Rabbi and responding by the congregation. We enjoyed the fact that we did not have to get there until 10:30 (services started closer to 11), and we were done by 12:30. The seats are upholstered - comfortable for naps during Rabbi Stan's sermon. Instead of a permanent Chazan, we have a cantorial soloist. Diego is a young fellow from Buenos Aires, who just arrived in HK about a month ago. He's tall and lanky, and reminds me of Andrew. I thought he did an excellent job in leading the service, but Jeff felt he was emoting a bit too much. Since it was his debut in HK, we felt that he had to prove himself.
After services, a pleasant buffet lunch was served. The congregation is very friendly, and we appreciated the fact that many of the members came over to us to introduce themselves and get acquainted.
Around 2 o'clock, we hopped into a minivan and went to Stanley Military Cemetery. We were led by Alastair, an older member of the congregation, who has a passion for the Jewish history of this part of the world. We visited the graves of Jewish soldiers (some Canadian), volunteers, and citizens, who died during WW2 in the battle for Hong Kong and its aftermath. So many people died during the War that they had to resort to using paving stones and road markers as grave stones (e.g., Essie Greenberg). We placed stones on the graves, and then stood under a tree and said Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. It was a very emotional experience.
Alastair not only told us about the fighting, but also about the Japanese occupation. Many foreigners were detained under brutal conditions in the Stanley detention centre (formerly a school). Isn't it interesting how we can walk today in very peaceful, idyllic places like Stanley or Ypres in Belgium, and almost forget the horrors that took place not so long ago?
From the cemetery, we proceeded to the beach. It was a very hot (34 degrees), cloudless day, so there were quite a few local Chinese families enjoying the sand and the water. I can't imagine what they thought of our group, all dressed up and throwing bread into the South China Sea, as we recited the Tashlich prayer! Rabbi Stan blew his formidable shofar at the end of the prayer. All-in-all, a memorable day.
Day 2 of RH is definitely optional at the UJC. I counted a total of 20 in the auditorium. Rabbi Stan's sermon was about his road trip last summer to a monastery in New Mexico and an Indian reservation in Oklahoma. I'm not quite sure why he chooses this topic ("what I did on my summer vacation") each year on the second day of RH (as I have been advised). I guess it's hard to come up with a meaningful theme each week of the year, but I would have preferred a speech with relevance to Hong Kong Jews, rather than a story about his meditations at a monastery.
Before Kol Nidre, Jeff and I ate our Chinese version of a traditional Shabbat meal. We went to a very good Cantonese restaurant recommended to us by a taxi driver! The "salad" was hot pot lettuce, cooked at the table in a yummy sauce. The "gefilte fish" was a whole fish, chopped and mixed with vegetables, then stuffed back into its skin, and presented on a steaming platter. But the best dish was our "brisket"- honey-glazed bbq pork, sliced diagonally, with sauce drizzled on top. All this was washed down "mit a cuppa tea". Close enough to the real thing. When we arrived at services, we told Hanora and Ed about our dinner. They told us that they had eaten at Grappa's, a popular Italian restaurant. No one cooks in HK!
At the end of Yom Kippur, the Kadoorie family sponsors the break fast for the entire Jewish community. (The Kadoories were mentioned in my Shanghai blog last week. They moved to HK in the 1940s, and own the Peninsula Hotel chain as well as the HK electric company.) Hundreds of people show up for this wonderful spread. It pays to befriend people who have lived here a while - Ursula and Stephen told us to avoid the crowds in the main hall, and to eat upstairs where there's always a place to sit.
Over all, the holidays were a little of the same, a little different, but very enjoyable.
Our synagogue, the United Jewish Congregation (UJC), certainly knows how to look after its members during the High Holidays. After services on Erev Rosh Hashanah, there was a festive dinner at the Jewish Community Centre. Unfortunately, services ended late, so we didn't eat until 10 p.m. While we were having dinner, the heavens opened up and we had a T3 downpour. Fortunately, we live around the corner from the JCC. Unfortunately, we were all dressed up and didn't have an umbrella. Jeff, my knight in shining armour, ran home with his briefcase on his head, fetched my flip-flops and a large golf umbrella, and came back to rescue me. While he was gone, I chatted with a woman who has been living here for 20 years. She was afraid to take a taxi home in the rain - I'm not sure how many hours she waited, since the rain did not let up until the next morning! (Yes, we meet all kinds of crazy expats here.)
On the first day of RH, our main challenge was getting used to the different tunes for familiar prayers. Jeff and I kept turning to each other and saying "don't know this tune" or "yay, we know this one!" (We missed Rabbi Weiss and the Narayaver service in Toronto, as well as Mary-Ann, Evelyn, and Richard, our shul buddies.) The service here is Reform, and there's a lot of reading by the Rabbi and responding by the congregation. We enjoyed the fact that we did not have to get there until 10:30 (services started closer to 11), and we were done by 12:30. The seats are upholstered - comfortable for naps during Rabbi Stan's sermon. Instead of a permanent Chazan, we have a cantorial soloist. Diego is a young fellow from Buenos Aires, who just arrived in HK about a month ago. He's tall and lanky, and reminds me of Andrew. I thought he did an excellent job in leading the service, but Jeff felt he was emoting a bit too much. Since it was his debut in HK, we felt that he had to prove himself.
After services, a pleasant buffet lunch was served. The congregation is very friendly, and we appreciated the fact that many of the members came over to us to introduce themselves and get acquainted.
Around 2 o'clock, we hopped into a minivan and went to Stanley Military Cemetery. We were led by Alastair, an older member of the congregation, who has a passion for the Jewish history of this part of the world. We visited the graves of Jewish soldiers (some Canadian), volunteers, and citizens, who died during WW2 in the battle for Hong Kong and its aftermath. So many people died during the War that they had to resort to using paving stones and road markers as grave stones (e.g., Essie Greenberg). We placed stones on the graves, and then stood under a tree and said Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. It was a very emotional experience.
Alastair not only told us about the fighting, but also about the Japanese occupation. Many foreigners were detained under brutal conditions in the Stanley detention centre (formerly a school). Isn't it interesting how we can walk today in very peaceful, idyllic places like Stanley or Ypres in Belgium, and almost forget the horrors that took place not so long ago?
From the cemetery, we proceeded to the beach. It was a very hot (34 degrees), cloudless day, so there were quite a few local Chinese families enjoying the sand and the water. I can't imagine what they thought of our group, all dressed up and throwing bread into the South China Sea, as we recited the Tashlich prayer! Rabbi Stan blew his formidable shofar at the end of the prayer. All-in-all, a memorable day.Day 2 of RH is definitely optional at the UJC. I counted a total of 20 in the auditorium. Rabbi Stan's sermon was about his road trip last summer to a monastery in New Mexico and an Indian reservation in Oklahoma. I'm not quite sure why he chooses this topic ("what I did on my summer vacation") each year on the second day of RH (as I have been advised). I guess it's hard to come up with a meaningful theme each week of the year, but I would have preferred a speech with relevance to Hong Kong Jews, rather than a story about his meditations at a monastery.
Before Kol Nidre, Jeff and I ate our Chinese version of a traditional Shabbat meal. We went to a very good Cantonese restaurant recommended to us by a taxi driver! The "salad" was hot pot lettuce, cooked at the table in a yummy sauce. The "gefilte fish" was a whole fish, chopped and mixed with vegetables, then stuffed back into its skin, and presented on a steaming platter. But the best dish was our "brisket"- honey-glazed bbq pork, sliced diagonally, with sauce drizzled on top. All this was washed down "mit a cuppa tea". Close enough to the real thing. When we arrived at services, we told Hanora and Ed about our dinner. They told us that they had eaten at Grappa's, a popular Italian restaurant. No one cooks in HK!
At the end of Yom Kippur, the Kadoorie family sponsors the break fast for the entire Jewish community. (The Kadoories were mentioned in my Shanghai blog last week. They moved to HK in the 1940s, and own the Peninsula Hotel chain as well as the HK electric company.) Hundreds of people show up for this wonderful spread. It pays to befriend people who have lived here a while - Ursula and Stephen told us to avoid the crowds in the main hall, and to eat upstairs where there's always a place to sit.
Over all, the holidays were a little of the same, a little different, but very enjoyable.
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