Ups and Downs

The last few days has had its ups and downs. On Saturday, we met with friends from Thailand and Sweden for drink and dinner. We guided, they paid, an excellent arrangement!

We started at the Ozone bar, an open air bar on 118th floor on the west side of Kowloon. Expensive drinks, but a fantastic view. A clear and definitive up! It got even better when Mats got a telling off by a British couple. They shouldn't have. Soon they stormed out of the bar. They lost. :-)

Dinner followed at Din Tai Fung. It was wonderful to see the happy faces of our friends when the tasted all the tasty Dim Sum dishes.

Otherwise, Mats spent most of the weekend in bed with a cold. Indisputable a down. Sunday evening we went to the Temple Street Night market. Pretty much like most other street markets we've seen, another down. Had dinner at a small Indian restaurant, everything seemed authentic (but neither of us has been to India, so what do we know?). Decent dinner at low cost. An up.

Monday night, we went to Quarry Bay to have dinner at a gastro-pub with a good selection of beer. Never found it in the maze-like building complex and ended up at a restaurant that looked pretty upscale, both on the outside and when seeing the prices. This was our first disappointment foodwise. The boiled potatoes was served raw, the wonderful Dove sole was smothered in garlic, the steak was to rare even for Mats, the aioli was hardly made from mayonnaise and lacked garlic, the estragon Bearnaise (are there any other kind?) was bland. A major down.

Tuesday night we went to an Italian restaurant in Causeway Bay. Instead of asking when not hearing/understanding, the staff just ignored you; Yvonne got the wrong pasta dish, no beer was served until we asked where it was. Both pasta dishes where almost completely void of flavors. And on top of it all: The beer selection sucked! Maybe not as big a down as the Monday dinner, but not far from. A little compensation was the tasty sago pudding we bought from a hole in a wall.

Tomorrow we will apply for Hong Kong IDs. It will be interesting to meet face to face with Hong Kong bureaucrats!