Imagine reading the best book ever and knowing that it is coming to a close, but desperately not wanting it to end. Even though ‘Japan’ is the next book and I am very excited about starting it. We lived in Hong Kong for nearly three and a half years and it has been fabulous. It is such an easy place to live with so much English spoken and so safe and easy to travel. I was worried about giving up…
My Dad just loved roast goose for Christmas … my mother would have purchased a large turkey yet most years my father waltzed through the door on Christmas Eve with a couple of dressed geese. A farmer always has good contacts! So before we left Hong Kong I felt that we should have a goose meal in memory of him. We had a chuckle as we imagined his expression when faced with jasmine rice and chopsticks though!
Hong Kongers love dogs and one of their favourite dog breeds seems to be the Welsh Corgi. Trying to understand why this was so, I came across an article in the South China Morning Post published in November 2019 on the best dog breeds for Hong Kong flats and discovered that first place was awarded the Pembrokeshire Welsh Corgi! And now for some a few amusing photos …..
2020 will be remembered for coronavirus and it’s consequences, but 2020 will be etched in my memory for the year of changing homes. We are currently in home number 5 and have at least one more ahead of us. We returned to the UK at the end of 2019 with the intention of returning to Hong Kong in early February 2020, after Chinese New Year. However coronavirus was then rampart in China so our year has panned out with Cirencester…
We enjoyed a long weekend with public holidays for the Mid Autumn Festival (a little like our harvest festival) on October 1st & 2nd. This is a family time with people eating together, displaying and burning paper lanterns and handing over gifts of Moon Cakes. These are sweet, dense pastry pies that are greatly appreciated …. but not by my taste buds! Unfortunately larger public displays of fire dragon dancing and other events were cancelled this year. We took the…
Somehow we managed to live in Hong Kong for three years but failed to visit Mui Wo, an oversight that we corrected at the weekend. Unfortunately we chose a time when our French friend & resident of Mui Wo was away. Sorry Isobel. Mui Wo, on the eastern coast of Lantau Island, is a traditional rural town of around 5,000 people. It was unusually quiet when we visited, no doubt because the beach is closed (all public beaches in HK…
It is by great coincidence that we are living in the same area of Hong Kong where we started off our life here three and a half years ago. I smile to myself as I review my first impressions and think about how I tried to make sense of what I was seeing and experiencing. My sense of direction was, and still remains, very poor so until I had a local sim card with google maps, I explored the area…
Having escaped weeks and weeks of Lockdown in the UK, we thought we were returning to a Hong Kong where everything was just about operating fully, but we returned to stringent conditions. Timing is everything ….! The day after emerging from our strict quarantine, all eating places were shut down. Other measures include wearing masks worn in all public places – in the street, whilst exercising (you won’t be surprised that this has had little effect on me!), indeed everywhere…
Monday 13th July, with face masks on, we left Bristol at 07.15 and eventually took off our face masks (changed on a number of occasions) some 34 hours later. Hong Kong has a statutory 14 day quarantine for all passengers entering the country, and I will share with you the procedure and process of quarantine. We arrived early at 06.30 (HK time) and spent a couple of hours being ‘processed’ – temperature taken, QR code of health form checked, wristbands…