Movin’ Day
October 21
After a bottle of red and three beers, I slept
well.
In the morning, Joanna asked me if I was enjoying
my hangover. I’ve talked before about my enjoyment of hangovers: It gives you
the promise of better things to come because you may hurt when you wake up, but
you know you’ll be feeling terrific by noon.
But surprising enough, considering that I had mixed
plenty of grape and grain, I didn’t have a hangover at all. I was ready in fact
to be tossed around a bit on the ferry.
We hadn’t gotten lost once outdoors in Macau, but
that was all right because there was plenty to see even when we knew where we
were. But inside the hotel was a whole ’nother story. The building is round,
like a beer barrel, so nothing inside can be straight. With what must go on in
there, you don’t want the devil hiding in any corners. It could be bad for
business if high rollers started to go up in flames.
We went to the desk in the lobby to check out and
they said we needed to go somewhere else. They called a bellman. We needed the
guide. He took us around a bend, up an alley, past an aquarium, and down a ramp
to the cashier’s desk.
We asked about the van to the ferry. The bellman
guided us back, past the check-in desk, around more bends and ramps to the
entrance where we were first rejected on Friday afternoon.
There may be a strategy to this. Besides casinos,
there are 24-hour jewelry and clothing stores, windows for placing bets on
horses and lotteries, and other places where on a whim you can drop anything
from a couple of patacas to a few thousand euros. Spreading out the check-in,
check-out, and the way home gives plenty of opportunity to show off the
concessions.
One thing curious that I forgot to mention: all the
uniformed staff at the Lisboa wear a flag of Red China pin.
The van
driver knew the way to the ferry, so we got there and through passport
control in time to catch the 12:45, which put us back in Hong Kong an hour
later. We saw plenty of ships flying the Red Chinese flag, but when we landed, nobody
was wearing a pin.
There was something that I had never seen before.
As we snaked through the cattle chutes, there was one switchback with cameras
and ladies in surgical masks sitting at a desk. The sign said “temperature
check.” It was probably infrared and they were going to stop anybody running
too hot. The memory of SARS must run deep around here.
The van and ferry trips were enough lugging, so we
took a cab to the hotel. The hotel is barely all right. Compared to the
accommodations in Macau and the even bigger space at the Central 88 on Des
Voeux Road, the room is cramped. They charge me $2.50 an hour for a slow Internet
connection. You can’t drink the water in Hong Kong, but they want to charge for
the bottled water in the room. On principle, we bought our own water at
7-Eleven. The closest 7-Eleven charges 50 HK cents for a plastic bag. Seems
everybody is grubbing every last cent in Kowloon.
[Editor’s note: Joanna told Harry later that the
fee for the bag is a green initiative by the government to cut down on waste.
This information was written in Han Chinese characters on the receipt. Harry
remembered yet again that he is a clumsy Yankee.]
The location of the hotel, however, is terrific.
I’m a block from Sam’s, where I bought my suit and Joanna ordered her skirt. We
are near the Kowloon Park and the Avenue of Comic Heroes.
For lunch we went to a place across the street and
shared a bowl of soup with mai fun, preserved vegetable, and shredded pork. I
had a Tsingtao. Service sucked, and it was too busy and noisy to relax, but the
soup was excellent.
We wandered up Nathan Road, the principal
commercial thoroughfare, and after a while the side streets were too much to
ignore. So we went up one that was cluttered with signs in Chinese and there was
an intriguing Asahi beer sign in front of a roof that looked like it was
falling down. We passed a food court, of sorts, where former street vendors
have been corralled. We had just eaten the soup, so we didn’t go in. The
falling roof was an awning for a seafood restaurant.
That’s where we stumbled on the Temple Street
Market. It was about four in the afternoon and the vendors were just setting
up.
It was only hours later when I remembered that I
had read about Temple Street in a guidebook. According to that source, there’s
a group of opera lovers at one end of the market that tries to get impromptu
performances going.
We plan to go back there after dark one night.
We went back to the hotel and then went across the
street to a restaurant called Grappa’s. We had had so much ginger soy sauce,
and oyster sauce that we were dying for some New Jersey food. We had an
antipasto, which in a first for me included a small slice of quiche and two
generous rolls of smoked salmon. There were also roasted peppers, eggplant,
prosciutto, salami, etc. All the basics of home. We followed that with a
rigatoni in a ragu.
Joanna had a Montepulciano d’Abruzzo. I had two
Chianti Marchesi Torrigiani with a Sangiovese Terre di Chieto in between.
After all that moving around and three glasses of
red wine, I didn’t have the strength to open a can of beer when we got back to
the hotel.
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