last weekend maggie and saturday invited me for a late lunch at their new flat in fortress hill. you know there's no place i won't go for free food. and there was so much of it - maggie spent the whole morning cooking. the best was the chicken wing marinated in coke zero, and the enokitake salad.
the flat was cute, full of toys and knick knacks (not for a future baby, for them!) ah. to be young and starting out.
something else that's new - this was the first time ever that i saw a religious procession in hong kong. i was climbing up the escalator, at night almost always full of suits on their way back to their posh mid-levels apartment from work, or party goers coming down to hollywood road and soho, when they started ascending with their candles (is that even safe, i mean lit candles on escalators?). as more and more of them appeared, their song, a church hymn, also got louder (the track on the video was added in, the audio originally recorded was of very poor quality).
i used to see a lot of this kind of candle procession growing up in the philippines, so it was a nice surprise to see it here. i hope they don't do this often tho. i remember how fascinating it was first time i saw a bunch of hare krishnas chanting and dancing and doing their drum thing in soho in london, but after seeing them again and again over a couple of months they just looked weird.
these are the friendly people that say hi to me everyday - they run the "dai pai dong" (street food restaurants) right in front of the building where i live, in stanley street in central. when i moved here, this street was packed every night with regular locals and adventurous foreigners feasting on freshly cooked food. the energy of this street was one of the reasons i chose this apartment. a few months ago tho, the health and sanitation department decided to close all the food stalls in the street and do a major clean up (the rats and roaches haven't forgiven them yet). the stainless steel stalls you see in the background are all new, they replaced the makeshift stalls (patches of incongruous materials) that used to be here. the street was stripped, sprayed with disinfectants and pesticide, laid with proper sanitation fittings, and repaved. they finished putting up the stalls last week.
the dinner (photo, above, taken new year's eve) was a dry run to test if things work. at least one of them (the one that serves seafood specialties) should be open again for business tomorrow.
