Haiku

Empty hotel room,
Loose change left for chambermaid,
Farewell spring moss.

You know I said that I wasn't going to go to Wan Chai

... well it turns out that I lied because after a a couple of beers after work when I was thinking "maybe I'll call it a night now" my host's i-Phone (everyone has one here it seems) gave a ring like some piece of laid-back chill electronica you would normally hear in some painfully modern drinking establishment called something like "Bar Bar Black Sheep" (they do have a bar here called the i-Dragon - don't think they served dragons though) and we get invited to meet up at somewhere called Laguna in, yep, Wan Chai.

OK so I'm prepared this time and also on a good position on the sober - rat-arsed axis so I figure what the hell.

I thought the Neptune II was a one off, nah, every bar in Wan Chai is stuffed to the gunnels with scantily clad Thai and Philippino women, quite a few of them hanging off the arms or sat in the laps of balding, tubby, 50-something year old white blokes including one guy in a flat cap who was, and I swear this is true, the spitting image of Bill Oddie. All kind of sad really but I'm not sure for who. It was the same in the other two clubs we visited as well, balding guys and Asian birds looking downright bored. After a while I made my excuses and left, I wanted to check on my moss which I had strategically placed at a very particular angle and place.



It had not moved! The moss was no longer mobile!

I did try making a tree out of it later on with the orange pencil for a trunk but that didn't work out very well. I just hope I've put the moss back in it's little white pot correctly or I'll probably be in trouble with the Hong Kong Moss Police.

Tai chi with weapons

In the great tradition of my last visit to HK I seem to be managing not to actually eat anything remotely Chinese.

Tonight I found there was an curry house called the "Koh I Noor" round the corner so popped in for some very lovely samosas and a passable chicken dopiaza (I keep forgetting that in Asia "chicken" means "scrawny bird that stopped laying so we threw it in a pot"). Afterwards I took a stroll through the park and came across six or seven people doing what could only be described as tai-chi exercises with swords, those flexible Chinese ones you saw in "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" with sensei occasionally stepping in and correcting a pose or movement. Can you imagine that in the UK, they would have been practising for 10 seconds before thirty armed plod would have shown up to arrest them for having offensive weapons.

Later on in the evening I spent an entertaining hour up in the open air rooftop bar where I'd gone to indulge in one of my duty free Montecristo No. 2's having a chat to a Korean chap called Roy about the UK premier league despite me knowing the square root of sod all about football. Mind you fully half of that was taken up with describing where Burnley was in relationship to Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool.

I have returned to my room to find...

... someone keeps moving my moss.

More about moss

The mystery that is the moss deepens.

On returning to the hotel this evening I discovered that the moss has been moved 40 degrees clockwise.



and on venturing to the first floor restaurant (do try the sea-bass on tomato and olive, it's very nice) my moss has a friend but it's red and lives next to a glowing steel mushroom.



Strange things are afoot in Taikoo Shing Road!

But in other news, I do like the desk I've been given for the week, here's the view.



which kind of beats my normal desk view of "lots of other people and if I jump up and flap my wings really hard I can see a bit of window 300 metres away" into a cocked hat quite frankly. However one thing I do not have to do in my existing London office is swallow to stop my ears popping in the lift which climbs faster than my old PA28 Turbo Arrow.

Anyway this evening after communing with the moss I managed to accidentally gatecrash some rugby drinking club's party who had taken over the hotel bar (couple of free beers - woot!) and then went for a walk over to Quarry Bay park by the East Channel to walk off the food and beer a bit. All very nice and warm, people jogging, the occasional kissing couple and even a couple of old men doing their Tai Chi exercises.

I came across this too, I think it's an offering to the ghost of someone as I heard that in Chinese and Japanese beliefs there is no food where ghosts go to so they have to come back to this world to eat so their relatives leave food out for them. I don't know what happened here as this was right by the sea wall but I guess the dear departed must have liked Sprite and biscuits.



(apologies for pic quality - these were all done on my camera phone)