A good number of pictures of Hong Kong that I have this day were taken in the morning.
It was a busy day.
Breakfast this morning we headed down to Fairwood, where I decided again to have the Chinese-Asian, so a bowl of century egg congee, and cheong fun it was.
The congee was pleasantly thick the way Cantonese porridges are done, and although I wish there could have been more of the century egg inside the smooth, silky slight yellowish congee, I was glad that the egg yolk was soft (there have been porridges where the egg yolks were cold and hard), and that it blended perfectly well with the soft, nearly invisible rice grains and the thin chicken shreds.
The cheong fun too was good.
Very solid, as some would say, thick on the rice rolls, thick on each slice of the roll, and more than enough chunks of char siew filling inside.
This morning I sat at the little park just outside Fairwood a wee bit.
It was nice, sitting on the bench, just me and myself, looking across the road to the buildings, the shops, and above me, trees, with their branches and canopies out.
What made this feel a little poignant was that I knew I would be heading home tomorrow, and I didn't know if the next time I came I would be coming back to this zone of Wing Hing Road and Electric Road again.
Breakfast over we headed onwards for a printing errand.
Google Maps had told us that the nearest printing shops to where we were had themselves located in this building called King's Park Lane.
Heading past this little park, going on a little along Electric Road, then making a right, we found ourselves back at Fortress Hill MTR station like we'd been a few days before. From here we made a left, and found ourselves onto King's Road.
I'm not sure if that's the actual name of the building, or if it is simply Park Lane, but we found it quite quickly whilst walking along King's Road.
Park Lane is like one of those buildings that reminds me of how some of the strata malls in Singapore are. They're the kind of buildings that don't have bright, welcoming lights or shiny gleaming walls, but have unit after unit of individual small businesses offering essential services for specific purposes.
It was quite charming, really.
Every unit had its own decor, its own way of marketing their services, its own way of arranging their stock, and if there wasn't enough space in their shop, the stock would spill out onto the narrow corridor.
The printing shop we went to was a whimsical type of hole-in-wall sort of place. Literally tucked into the corner, it was a place so easy to miss had there not been a whole row of A4 papers taped to the edge of the wall showing their services and the accompanying rates.
What struck me interesting was that there seemed to be only three computers, or even two, in the shop, with just two staff manning the place.
One person worked on the computer inside the shop.
Another worked on the computer at the entrance of the shop.
From the looks of incoming emails and the pings of incoming messages on Whatsapp and other messaging platforms, it seemed like a steady influx of business.
No surprise; Hong Kong is still a place of pen and paper and flyers here, there, everywhere.
We got our QR codes printed and headed back to the hotel.
On the way back I managed to take a couple of pictures.
Not very much- there were a lot of pedestrians and I don't like taking pictures of people- but the buildings here along King's Road were more than enough.
This block, in particular, fascinated me.
I'm not sure if I have seen this block in some tourism-related photography material before.
I'm not sure if it is this block.
But it is architecture like these that oft get featured in pictures depicting the cityscape of Hong Kong.
For some reason they always seem to mention Kowloon.
They don't mention Hong Kong Island, or any of the many housing estates dotted around the territory.
We got back to the hotel, got some work done, then went out for lunch.
Today we decided again to have roast goose, not at the place we'd been to the day before, but at the place where we'd actually intended to go.
The place had a bit of a restaurant decor, which I thought really nice, and, seeing how crowded it was, must have appealed to many of their patrons too.
The plate of roast goose rice was delicious, marinated a little differently, I think, from the diner of the previous day, but there was still the perfect balance between crispy roast goose skin, the layer of fragrant roasted fat, and the chonk of goose meat that went better with the rice than eaten plain on its own.
Not a necessity, but complementary soup would have been nice.
On our way back to the hotel to grab the suitcase of paper bags, card-sized mists, print cards, tripods, and everything else, we stopped by a bakery to get two buns.
In case we got hungry.
So it was to the AIA Carnival at the harbor we went.
And there we stayed, all the way from late afternoon until 10pm.
Were we tired?
Yes.
Were we thankful and glad?
Absolutely yes.
We ate them buns sitting on a bench in the chilly, windy, bracing pleasant night air near the ferry steps, our hearts feeling a little contemplative at the thought of having to leave the harbor winds of Hong Kong.
But our role here was done.
We took the MTR back to the hotel, stopping at Fortress Hill MTR this evening for the McDonalds that I remembered was a late-night place.
As it turned out, the place was a 24-hour, and happily we ordered a pineapple chicken bun (still the Chinese New Year season), Twister fries, chicken nuggets (for the sweet and sour sauce!) and a bowl of crayfish soup, which, to me, felt a little like the whitened version of lobster bisque but tasted so good anyway.