Hong Kong 2011 - Part 1

Hong Kong! The land of perfectly roasted goose, soft century eggs, yummilicious egg tarts and 8 million people in a tiny Island! Here we took the airport transfer to Hong Kong, costing ~HKD120 for 2 pax.

One way out!
Started off the photography earnest with the subway,

With the mobile-self-centered nation also prevalent in Hong Kong, with most commuters busy texting away....

We stayed at Newton Hotel Hong Kong http://www.newtonhk.com/, with compliments from the Buffer Club. The hotel was located right next to the Fortress Hill MTR station. Here's a stair master right next to the junction behind Hotel Newton!

We had wanted to go for the 'Bouncing' meat balls, and we found this Lok Yuen place instead. Fantastic Fish balls! The meatballs are good too. Noodles with the meat balls were great.

Another street shot, at one of the biggest interchanges anywhere around, the Hong Kong / Central interchange!

The busy streets of Mong Kok. Bargains aplenty anything from Iphone covers, Angry birds motifs, fake watches!

A lovely Audi showroom in the middle of Kowloon.

The Mercedes showroom at Lee Gardens, photography wasn't allowed: I'm like. WTF?! I continued snapping anyway! Who can turn away from the silvered mean beasts!?

The SLS AMG 6.3L with winged doors, carbon fibre side view mirrors and a hosts of tech enough to make any car-nut cum in their pants. Cost a cool HKD3,700,000. (Only ~SGD$600,000).

Excellent fish balls from the Lok Yuen place.
Crown wine cellars

Lovely Carla, the lady of the moment

Halifax Ad Lib 2008, pretty good.
13.5% alcohol, 84% Grenache 16% Shiraz. Sweet fruits, chocolate after taste. It grows on one! A nice Grenache from Mclaren vale!

Lanson NV, house pour champagne. Quite decent. Prefer the Rose version anytime!

Sutherlands Creek, Geelong 1st White 2007: Saugvinon blanc, Semillon and Viognier blend. Citrus nose, balance palette, apples, ton of sunshine. Very enjoyable.

One of the most fulfilling meals, at Kam Dau Kee. Kam Dau Kee Seafood Restaurant, Shop A3 & 1/F, Block 2 & 3, The Zenith, No.3 Wan Chai Road, Wan Chai, Hong Kong

Excellent roast goose, suckling pig, and this lovely thick pork liver broth with a 'jiu3' vegetables. Really memorable!

At a flea market, big fresh Sun Flowers, who can resist a smile?

There's a saying: the unbeaten path is the best, and if a restaurant doesn't have a menu in English, it'd done a 'good job', not to sell-out to the masses. This is one of them, just 'another' coffeshop we went in a morning. Soya bean hot froth tasted sweet and pretty different from what we have in Singapore. Wenhui loves it but I won't be having another bowl of this at this restaurant.

Another sweet street shot!

It was my first time on a Tram, and I loved it! Trams are classic, feels great to have the wind in your hair (in late autumn...good times compared to squeezing in the MTR), and they're bloody cheap! Cost HKD2.30 per ride regardless of distance! And trams exists only in Hong Kong Island!

A non-HK meal, as all the HK restaurants were booked solid over and waiting lists were long. This was on the final day in HK and we settled for a Jap restaurant.

Agnes B cafe, some expensive ~HKD60 slide of cake @ Lee Gardens. A worthy pit-stop, lack of crowd, and comfortable seats and environment!

While the girls can troll the streets for other hunts, this was my heaven. A wine shop! Berry Brothers and Rudd! Lovely selection all around, had the pleasure to taste some good whisky with Kat. ;)

Honolulu Cafe / Tahn Doh, Hennessey Rd #176-178. Get out Wanchai MTR station, exit A4.
Perfectly cooked egg tarts. DO NOT ORDER fried rice and bee hoon here. Those taste like CRAP! Just order the egg tarts, bo luo bao, and a drink!

Angry birds on a sling! What a great way to whack your friend when you're bored in a classroom.

I was guested by friends in Shenzhen for a couple of days. Rice wine was the topic of the day and I was burping it through the night! haha

Great street food, BBQ fish! A little salty though.

A game of chance, of drinking!

Traveling and rushing from A to B to C is really tiring and causes the body to heat up. Here's a visit to an empty desert shop, serving a pretty famous Quilingao. It tasted neither herbalish nor smooth. The texture was rough and wasn't pleasant at all. However, my body felt cool after this! Hence it does work!

iphone 4S - succumbing to white and black

You know an era has truly changed, when your friends leave you out of a group chat because you don't have whatsapp. This brings back memories of the instant chat messenger ICQ of 1999/2000, where it practically dominated the entire IM market. It could leave offline messages, and a function can let one turn one 'live' chat, meaning as you're typing, the receiving party can see what you're typing, including the backspaces. Then came Microsoft Messenger, MSN, with it's cute emoticons and alone with that, friends uprooted from ICQ en masse and left for MSN, leaving ICQ extinct. And you're right, I had to leave, reluctantly. Now MSN is the default, with group chats, offline messages, history all in place and more.

In 1997/1998. SMS was a very new concept in Singapore, phones were seriously expensive and SMS rocked, leaving the alphanumeric days of the Motorola Jazz behind, and an industry circling SMS was born. Now, apps, mobile messaging, threatens the existence of SMS. whatsapp, mobile msn, skype, recently imessage, and 'compilers' of IM such as ebuddy with a super new XMS function, (XMS can send free SMS from any desktop computer (or mobile one that is), the SMS market is looking bleak!

Telcos who have been charging by the minute/second/sms, has to rethink seriously now, as voice/sms are all simply data over the precious GSM networks, while the previously unheard 12Gigabytes of bandwidth per month for surfing needs over the 3G networks could be holding the GSM networks by the throats. I'm still unsure why 3G is still 'behind' GSM, it's slow in terms of speed/coverage/bandwidth throttle? (eg: voice over skype or any of your favourite IMs are usually poorer than voice over GSM networks).

The end of an era. I've the HTC Rose S740 for ~3 years. Back in 2008, there was the iphone, but it wasn't as superb as it is now, and I never had the need for such a 'smart' phone nor the saw the feasibility of a touch screen device, preferring the feel and feedback of real keys. The S740 also had a QWERTY keyboard which one can slide out. The plan was to go online with Wireless@SG if required to do some surfing and emails on the go. Wireless@SG has turned out to be pathetic! The only saviour I had was the S740 was run on a windows platform (ok..Andriod and iOs trumps all now, but then Windows Mobile was not relatively good), and the SMSes were 'threaded', and it was profoundly useful. Also, it had 'quick texts', allowing short cut keys to reply chunks of text (such as addresses, emails etc). Overall the Rose worked really well for 3 years bearing an initial 1-2weeks of nightmare service from M1/HTC.

The moving out of the old, in for the new....the 'home page' of the HTC, clean, with simple icons, and showing upcoming appointments, any SMSes unread etc. (compared to the million updates from FB/Twitter/BBM/whatsapp/emails from a few accounts that I'm handling partly with the BlackBerry Bold).

Wenhui's 4S, previously she was using a HTC wave : A rubbish, half-baked brick, a s(tupid)phone. It was one of the first foray of HTC-Android phones, with promises of seamless integration with Google products. The HTC Wave was slow, surfing of the net was worse than the 56k modem century.

Now, the time has come that I need a truly smartphone, as work requires the update/speed that we need to push information out, and gather information as well. And I feel the Apple has worked this out well with the 3GS and especially the Iphone 4. And now with the dual core A5 of the Iphone 4S, the smartphone in it's 5th generation, is finally becoming of age and worthy of all the accolades poured onto Job's Apple.

Only 1 day old into the Iphone (yes, I'm a very old virgin), I've become a teenage school boy you see on the MRT, hogging the toy all day, grinning to myself, and not having much conversation with my mom nor anyone around me.

I've woken up today (day 2), to the Iphone's alarm, and downloaded 'RunKeeper app (whilst still in bed), and let out a 'woot'! with a big grin akin to unwrapping kryptonite on Christmas morning. The app went superbly went in the 6.2km run, with GPS, location systems, all locking on, without lag, and a dozen buzzing updates in the background.

I love it!

Thank you, Steve.
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