Celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival in HK

Lights are a big part of HK's iconic night scene--from the thousands of neon billboards to the Symphony of Lights over Victoria Harbour. So it's no surprise the mid-Autumn festival celebrations included a number of lantern carnivals across the city. Traditionally, the mid-Autumn festival celebration includes moon glazing in a park and playing with hand carried lanterns (candle-lit). Today the city brings families together to celebrate the festival at local parks with elaborately designed, LED lit lanterns.

After braving the MTR crowds on Thursday night, we made it to Shatin's mid-Autumn festival lantern carnival at Sha Tin Park. A number of Family had blankets spread out on the grassy areas and shared mooncakes and played with glowsticks and homemade lanterns.

I was really impressed by the intricate details and the size of these lanterns.

My three favourite lanterns that were on display were:

#3: The traditional rotating lantern

The centre panel of this lovely lantern rotates to show different images (Photo:CathC)

#2: Bunnies admiring the vase

These bunnies staring the vase lantern were so cute (Photo:CathC)

#1: The 9-meter lotus showpiece

This handcrafted lotus lantern consist of 5 levels and each of the panels painted with Chinese scenes can also rotate (Photo: CathC)

Aside from these beautiful lanterns that lit up the park, there were also traditional round lanterns which dangled riddles underneath. These riddles are Chinese word riddles which are typically about facts and history around the mid-autumn festival.

If you guessed 5 of these riddles correctly, you win a prize (Photo: CathC)

It was a beautiful night in the park to enjoy the full moon and the impressive hand-crafted lanterns. Although I didn't play with any lanterns in the park, I bought a couple to decorate my flat with. Two AA batteries operate these LED.lanterns and they are decently bright. The starfruit is my favourite because the tissue-paper like material makes it very delicate and pretty to look at.

My goldfish and starfruit lanterns (Photo:CathC)

Happy mid-Autumn Festival!

A bus ride across town

My aunts and uncles keep telling me how enjoyable bus rides are in HK because there's so much to see along the ride. So today I decided to see the view for myself and took the bus across town from Tseung Kwan O out to Shatin. I was surprised to ride in such an empty bus on a weekend; I practically had the entire second level of the double-decker bus all to myself!

The bus ride turned out to be a nice change from my usual MTR rides, as I got to see more of the local streetscape. HK is a city built with a series of intertwining overpasses. Actually, this is one of the only places I've been to where crossing the road often requires going through a bridge or a "subway" (隧道).

Taking the 798 bus route to Shatin (Photo: CathC)

The 798 bus route also goes through the Tseung Kwan O tunnel, Kwun Tong Bypass, and finally Tate's Cairn Tunnel. Along the way I got a pretty nice views of the Victoria Harbour skyline facing the Hong Kong island side,

Another busy weekend for cargo ships (Photo: CathC)

and also the former Hong Kong Kai Tak airport international airport. Currently, Kai Tak is a cruise ship terminal for a variety of cruise ships traveling across Asia.

The site of Hong Kong's former Kai Tak Airport (Photo: CathC)

About 40 minutes later I arrived in Shatin.

Asia's first Snoopy's World at Shatin's New Town Plaza (Photo: CathC)

This canoe behind the clock is actually a ride (Photo: Cath)

After today's trip, I see that that buses can be a pretty good way to go sight-seeing around the city on the weekends. (These double-decker buses are usually filled with commuters during the weekdays). At least, you can see the different scenery of the city as you travel from one part to another. The only downside of buses is that they come less frequently than the MTR, so I probably wouldn't use to as a means of hopping on and off between sites.

Jazz on a rainy afternoon

The local malls are popular venues for concerts during the summer time. I guess it's a good opportunity to showcase new talents and also draw people into one of the numerous malls across the city. Yesterday I stumbled into a mall outside of Tsim Sha Tsui to find shelter from the rain, and was in time to catch the Gimme Live concert series.

There was a "roped off" area in front of the stage and a bunch of concert organizers were walking around the area trying to get people to come into the area and watch the show (rather than from other areas of the mall). I guess because there is a lot of shopping options in the area, this particular mall didn't seem too busy. The concert organizers had a very hard time drawing a crowd for the performances. I must have been asked 3 or 4 times as  I walked around the shops by the stage if I wanted to enter the 'roped off' area to watch the performance. The show didn't start until almost half an hour after it was originally planned for, so I decided not to watch from the roped off area, but at places randomly around the mall instead.

A summer concert at a local mall by Tsim Sha Tsui (Photo: CathC)

Although I wasn't too familiar with the artists there were a good number of fans that were present, as you can see from the pretty signs some of the fans had made. My favourite group was Indica Trio. This jazz trio had a really energetic performance.Plus the saxophone player had some really terrific improvisation. Overall I enjoyed the show, which was a nice surprise as I had just happened to stumble into this mall to avoid the rain.

Fresh seafood from the local waters

I finally had the chance to try some of the famous seafood in Sai Kung this past weekend. In an earlier post about Sai Kung's Dragon Boat Festival I had written about the wide variety of seafood that were being sold directly from local fishermen.

But this time I actually tasted what fresh local seafood is like. The seafood restaurant I went to was along the pier and had a large selection of local seafood to choose from. There were tanks and tanks of crabs, fish, shrimp, and other shell fish.

Did you notice some lobsters are held inside plastic bottles? Apparently they are to keep them from cannibalizing each other according to this article. (Photo: CathC)

I couldn't tell which variety of shrimp would taste best, but tried the pink stripped ones--3rd last container in the top right corner. (Photo: CathC)

These were the largest and sweetest tasting scallops I've ever had--delicious! (Photo: CathC)

Most of the seafood restaurants in Sai Kung let you pick your own seafood and then they cook it for you. So the cost of each dish also includes an extra preparation fee. But the waiters were pretty friendly in giving suggestions like how much shrimp to order per person and also helpful in choosing the meatest oysters. I tried the meaty crab (ones in the tank on the bottom left), razor clams (long narrow shellfish), oysters, seabass, and  scallops. I really enjoyed the deep fried oysters which really were the meatest once I've ever had. But my favourite dish was the scallop. The cooked scallops are topped with garlic and green bean vermicelli (紛絲) and are very juicy and sweet.

There's just so much variety of seafood in Sai Kung that I'll have to come back again to try the rest. There's still mantis shrimp, lobster, and plenty of other fish to try...

The lively mantis shrimp (Photo: CathC)

A windy day off in HK

I'm writing this post in the middle of a severe typhoon which is passing by Hong Kong and is expected to make landfall near Yangjiang over the western coast of Guangdong, China later today. Since the No. 8 Southeast Gale or Storm Signal is in force, I didn't have to go into work! Surprisingly even though a No. 8 tropical cyclone warning is hoisted, the weather doesn't seem all that bad. The doors were banging a bit late last night and I could the loud gusts of windy in the early morning. The maximum wind gusts varies quite a bit across Hong Kong (47 km/h in TKO but 78 km/h out in Cheung Chau) But the sun has been peaking out from behind the clouds periodically throughout the morning and mid-afternoon.

I guess the severe winds and unstable weather makes it a potentially dangerous to be outdoors and/or commuting.

One minute it's calm the next it's pouring rain.

Looking in the direction of the Tseung Kwan O Stadium and Popcorn Mall in TKO, Hong Kong (Photo: CathC)

The unpredictable weather during a tropical cyclone--heavy rain and fog 15 minutes after the photo above was taken (Photo: CathC)

The roads were quite empty today, as most people heed the government warnings to stay home/indoors. Buses and minibuses are out of service, but the MTR and some taxis are still operating.


The Hong Kong Observatory provides quite a bit of important about this Severe Typhoon Utor and you can track the path here on their website. You can see from this map, predicting the path of typhoons is actually a very challenging task. The path can change rapidly and veer off course. Here's the good animation from the Hong Kong Observatory of how quickly the weather changes as seen at Victoria Harbour.

But to put things in perspective, not everyone has a day off because of the tropical cyclone warning. Most of the restaurants in the local malls and plazas are actually still open. So I'm pretty lucky that even though there's a storm outside, there's still plenty of food options--so time to head downstairs for lunch...

Maywa Denki's crazy musical instruments

Maywa Denki showcased their Otamana and other crazy electronic musical instruments at today's performance in a local mall in Hong Kong's Tseung Kwan O district. The show featured a number of uniquely designed electronic musical instruments created by Nobumichi Tosa.

Maywa Denki performs at a local mall in Hong Kong (Photo: CathC)

Featured here are the "Poodle Head" (engine-driven steel jaw); "Takedamaru" (saxophone shaped airhorn); "Pachi-Moku" (backpack like device operates with electronic finger snappers)

Nobumichi Tosa led today's performance and he is also the producer of Maywa Denki. The other half of the creative team behind this Japanese new media art unit is Nobumichi's elder brother Masamichi Tosa. According to their website, "...each piece of Maywa Denki’s work is called 'a product' and a live performance or exhibition is held as 'a product demonstration'.

The "Na-Tate-Goto" (fins pick the harp-strings as the head spins) and the "Glass Carp" (handle turns the class harp) are two instruments on display at the mall (Photo: CathC)

Maywa Denki has performed with their outrageous musical instruments worldwide and today's humourous musical act was the first time the band played in HK. Their performance was well received by the crowd and everyone clapped along to Mayway Denki's covers of a  number of famous songs, including: Queen's "We are the Champions" and Frank Santra`s "My Way". But the crowd really went wild for Denki's rendition of Alan Tam's famous 愛情陷阱 ("Love Trap"). Although I only had a vague idea of the song, watching Denki's performance really made me smile. His energetic and crazy act was fantastic. This last song was definitely my favourite performance of the afternoon.

I thought the most memorable musical instrument from today's show is the Otamatone. It makes sounds when you squeeze on the base of the instrument and slide your hand along the neck. I wonder how much these instruments are sold for...

Nobumichi Tosa performs with his Otamatone (Photo: CathC)

Hello Kitty goes back to the 1960s

I've blogged about mall displays in the past and I'm still being impressed by the creativity and detail that goes into their design. The latest creation I came across was the Hello Kitty Back to 1960s @Langham Place. This display included a number of life size shops (e.g. street snack stalls) and landmarks (e.g. Lion Rock Tunnel) representative of historical HK.

Hello Kitty and Daniel's take on Chinese opera (Langham Place=朗豪坊) (Photo: CathC)

 

The Hello Kitties were a big hit with mall goers and drew huge crowds of people wanting to take photos in front the displays. But sometimes I don't understand what the mall planners/designers are thinking by placing such a huge display in the middle of the food court. The food court is pretty busy normally so having the display at the center meant to get from one end of the foodcourt to the next, we have to walk around display in nearly single file....

A view of the 'Express escalator" from the 11th floor of Langham Place (Photo: CathC)

Navigating through the crowds is something I'm not entirely use to yet. How does everyone do it--enjoy your own conversations/interactions with other people within arms reach on either side of you? Hopefully patience and the ability to block out people are some skills I can to pick up soon!

In any cases, displays like other ads in Hong Kong change very quickly. So there's always something new to attract our attention. With so much to see I'm sure I'll get use to the crowds eventually....