James & Georgie

Where huge apples are in abundance.

I’m staying in an 18th-storey apartment with my dad; the whole apartment is smaller than our kitchen in our house back in Sydney. The shower cubicle is barely larger than our bathmat, and the first few times I used it I bumped into pretty much every surface in the damn thing. Occasionally I still do.

For size comparison. No, my feet aren't abnormally big.

 I have taken plenty of photos, but I’m only uploading the ones that are even remotely interesting. My skills as a photographer are pretty far below par; even the shots I took after climbing The Peak look like I just took them from some dude’s balcony.

Ah, jeez.

If there’s one thing I can describe without photos, it’s the food. Where back in Australia a Big Mac would set you back a good $7 (if memory serves. It probably doesn’t; I avoid McDonalds back home because of the insanely crappy value for money) here it’d only cost you a measly $2. Everything edible is more or less set back by a similar proportion, and there are so many damn new things I have never even tried.

A leg of roast goose. Note my dead eyes, blinded by the tastiness.

Oh, and Pizza Hut is a pretty big freakin’ deal over here.

Cheesy pasta, and stuffed crust. They eat like kings.

Our two dishes took 25 minutes to arrive and was served by some dude who was dressed like an actual waiter, not some 15 year old kid who probably shat in your mushrooms.

Another thing we tried was ‘dar bien lo’; you pick a soup which arrives above a burner. You cook meats, veges and noodles in it, and eat the stuff and then drink your soup. I’ve had it many times at home, but in a restaurant is quite an interesting experience. While both my Dad and I failed to photograph this, we saw some tourists that were rather stumped by the whole procedure, and were cautiously trying to roast their meat with their chopsticks above the burners. We were properly getting into it by the time they realised what the soup was actually for.

A great thing about this city is the Octopus system; it’s a prepaid card you can buy and top up at virtually any convenience store, and then just swipe by a reader to pay at most stores, and all modes of public transport. It even works through your wallet!

Other places I went to was the Promenade where many Chinese actors had left cement handprints (Jackie Chan’s looked far more enthusiastic than anyone else’s), Sai Kung fishing village (fishing no longer allowed), and the famous Ap Liu electronics market, which I will soon return to to buy a new mobile phone and take some happy-snappies.

Yesterday my dad and I were at a space museum where, among other things, they had a rotating gyroscope ride…

To infinity...and other places.

Most of the other rides were pretty bad; this one worked well probably due to its sheer simplicity. The ‘land the laser dot on the three photoreceptors’ ride was unbearable, and don’t even get me started on the Mars Rover thing.

Bastard.

You basically manipulated a crude pneumatic robot arm to pick up rocks. It was rather straightforward, except moving the robot left/right was very erratic, which nearly drove my dad insane. Sometimes it’d respond and most of the time it wouldn’t, causing him no end of frustration and grief.

Does he look like a bitch?