Family Arrives In Hong Kong!

Sorry we’ve been off the grid in the past couple of weeks but it’s been a whirlwind time. Lizzie’s family has been visiting, I’ve traveled to CA and fro to visit my ill but recovering father, I’ve just come from Tokyo on business and now only have a moment to write before hopping a plane to rendez-vous with Lizzie & Co in Cambodia.

Dan and Donna arrived last week, a couple of days in advance of Barr and Katherine so they had a head start on shaking off the jet lag cobwebs. But with Lizzie’s granddaughter starved family in town Ingrid has been the recipient of a whole lot of attention. Lots of baby talking’, goofy singin’ and general silliness has had a permanent smile on little Ing’s still toothless face.
It is so great to have them in town, and though we knew it at the time we may have underestimated how fortunate we were prior to our move to be surrounded by so many loving sets of helping hands.

Lizzie has missed family terribly since arriving in town and because we’ve not yet formed a social circle in HK it is nice to have adult conversation with someone except each other. Ingrid has seen her grandparents with frequency across our iMac’s video conference function, but the two dimensional version of Grandma and Grandpa comes nowhere close to simulating the in-the-flesh feeling of being cradled by two of her biggest fans.

The family has spent the past week on a jog thru Central Vietnam before heading west to Cambodia where I meet up with them tomorrow. Medical professionals frown on babies visiting the Angkor Wat temples for fear of malaria so we’ll be keeping her in Phnohm Penh while others visit the ancient monuments. Meantime she’ll be cloaked in mosquito net to keep her from any of our dangerous flying friends. She’s in the period we’re everything she grabs goes straight into her mouth so I imagine we’ll be constantly pulling the netting from her clutches.

It’s interesting to see Dan and Donna reacquaint themselves with the city their daughter now calls home. We visited the historic Luk Yu Teahouse which has been in business since the early 1900’s because of their delicious local cuisine and selection of tea leaves, not because of the waitstaff’s winning personalities. It was fun to see Dan and Donna dust off their chopstick skills. At the beginning of the meal they couldn’t manage the relatively easy ‘pick up’ of a green bean, by the end they were gracefully gripping the slipperiest of dumpling. But the ultimate test of chopstick skills (and gag reflex) is the Thousand Year Old Egg, a hard boiled egg preserved and fermented over weeks/months. I was not able to coax anyone into partaking. I’ve eaten a lot of crazy stuff in Asia, but I must say that the local appeal of the 1KEgg is something I cannot understand, or stomach.

Upon Barr and Katherine’s arrival we were feted at the fabulous restaurant Hutong. Northern Chinese fare in a swanky, cool-for-school setting on a top floor of a Kowloon skyscraper offering panorama views of the Hong Kong skyline. Great vistas mean high prices though they were mildly offset by the cost of our transportation out there on the Star Ferry. In a city where a martini at a nice hotel can cost upwards of 25 bucks and rent is extortionately expensive, a lift across Victoria Harbor is still the best bargain in HK at just about 25 cents, reminding locals and tourists alike that there is still some charm left in this city.



We also managed to take in afternoon tea at the Peninsula Hotel....Well, that would have been the refined thing to do but we were starving so we ordered burgers, hot dogs and cokes. I always thought my first trip to the venerable Kowloon hotel would be for the tea service and that I'd be dressed in a suit. Instead I sported jeans, a tee shirt and a Red Sox hat as I ate my hot dog.....Ugly Americano for a day. Ingrid did me one better and used the time to catch some Zzzz's on a bed created by 2 chairs pushed together.

This is a bit of a hastily slapped together posting of text and pictures….we’ll send up a more comprehensive post when the dust settles next week.