More Hong Kong

We are of course up very early again and on the streets by 6:30. Victor assures me that he saw a Western styled coffee shop just up the road that will be open. When we have reached a point of walking that I consider to be "half-way to China" I speak up. It's dark, surely dangerous, walls of rolled down uninviting metal doors, and looking less and less likely to provide dining of any sort. I don't thing Asia tends to wake up early and certainly not on a Sunday! We turn around....walk more...finally we see food-in-the-window-signs, lights on upstairs and head that way....ends up that it is a research center for healthy food. This is not going to work....but from the top of the stairs we spy a restaurant on the second floor of the building across from us in full swing.

We find the entrance and go. Ahah! I think we are the only Westerners here, today or many days, perhaps ever. Many of the diners have a good chuckle at our inability to communicate. We try ordering coffee. This works, but comes cold. We then are looking at a menu of Chinese characters (strangely, the first restaurant without a picture menu.) We are frantically whispering back and forth about how are we going to order without getting fried bugs and live snakes for breakfast. Our waitress comes over and tells us we will have dim sum and she will bring things for us. I enjoyed it, Victor prefers eggs for breakfast.

We take a cab over to the Ferry terminal and explore another island, this one Cheng Chou. Bigger than yesterdays exploration, even some of the market stalls are open. We walk across the isthmus to the beach on the further side of the island and are surprised to see litter. Everywhere else we have been has been fantastically well tended and clean. Its warm and humid.

When we come back we take a cab to the Causeway for shopping. This was really high energy walking. Dynamic crowds everywhere. We got tangled in the maze of streets and bought three sweaters. I wanted to get on one of those narrow two story buses and just go where ever it went, so we did...in the wrong direction for about a minute. But that was cool.

We head over to SoHo for lunch and end up at Cafe de Paris, a French place styled after a train car. Very nice, we both chose their fixed course lunch with an octopus salad, a steak and a delicious tart dessert. We got some great recipe ideas here: Homemade ice-cream of the week, a chocolate fondue dessert with lady fingers & strawberries. Raspberry port over ice-cream, creme brulee or cheese cake...

After lunch we head back to the hotel for our nap, this time we did not sleep through the evening and headed over to Kowloon and the Temple Street Night Market. This one victor really enjoyed. He set his focus on a couple of things and drove a hard bargain. We can now call him Mr. Roll-ex, ha ha!

We then wandered into a whore house and had side by side foot massages by two ladies of the night.

For dinner we returned to SoHo and chose a Spanish restaurant serving Argentine beef. Nothing new here.