HK Life

This is our 6th or is it 7th time to visit HK and today marks our 3rd week here. It is a rainy and quite cold day as temperatures dropped to 13 degrees Celsius after a few days of being 23 degrees Celsius and humid., so I am thinking it is best to stay indoors as we have gone to most of the tourist attractions during our past visits.

Of course, we stay with my sister who on March 1st 'celebrated' her third month post-op and she also returned to work that day. I really admire her strength and her stamina to persevere despite still reeling from her incision and her wounds (which I believe has not fully healed yet given that three vital organs were removed!!!). She still drinks many meds and gets tired easily as the climate here fluctuates daily.

I love the cold climate as I have very active sweat glands and I've heard from the hubby that it is already quite hot, back home. Despite walking a lot here as we take public transport and the bus stops and the MTR stations can be quite far, I still gained weight as the all the walking makes me eat more.

Dimsum galore

I also tend to drink a lot more coffee and this doesn't really agree with me as I had some palpitations the other night and it caused my blood pressure to shoot up. Thank God for BP maintenance meds, I was able to calm down and relax. Perhaps a mixture of added caffeine, fatigue (from walking) and eating fatty food caused what I call my anxiety attack. I am fine now, so far I have managed to avoid caffeine and drink more water!

Public toilets here are sometimes either too dirty or hard to locate so we find a suitable mall to use its facilities. Another thing I really dislike here is the populace's inability to communicate in English. I mean ... come on, please make some effort to learn basic and common English terms. Hong Kong is visited by millions of tourists from all over the world who contribute to the booming economy of this tiny island state yet the service crew in restaurants, the sales staff of shops in malls will talk to you in Cantonese. They also tend to shout and can get quite rude when they cannot understand what you are trying to convey. 

For example in restaurants, you have to ask for their English menu which are quite limited in choices. When we saw the dishes on the other tables were more 'appetizing', we were asking what they were but the one taking our order just shouted at us and pointed at the English menu and seemed quite vexed with us that we couldn't decide what we wanted to eat. Such rude and dismissive attitudes of the local populace was the subject of a letters to the editor article I read in the local English paper. A recent visitor was lamenting the fact that she couldn't communicate properly and this was a big turn off for foreign guests and visitors. 

On that note, I end by saying that everything else is quite efficient here. People line up to ride buses, the MTR trains are quite wide and its short intervals between trains are excellent. Malls don't have security guards to check your bags, small shops usually don't give out plastic or paper bags (if you want, you have to pay) and people just leave holding the items with their bare hands or put them in their own tote bags but after paying for them, naturally. People also get up and offer their seats in public transport to elderly riders (like my aging parents) even if they look like senior citizens too! 

This is it for now ...  next time I will post pictures from our Macau trip!