But, OK, the reason I rented this terrible apartment is that outside the door is all this. And I mean right outside the door — I can walk from the subway station to the apartment door in a rainstorm without getting wet, thanks to the tangle of escalators and walkways above. I like being surrounded by snack stands and shops but, honestly, living next to a running escalator has been on my life list ever since seeing Chungking express.
The apartment I’ve just moved into is… well, it has a bed and a shower and a sink and a hotpot so I guess it is technically an apartment, but it is tiny. I’m a tiny apartment enthusiast, but this place is smaller than the houseboat and we may finally have determined my lower bound for comfort.
Mostly I’m just self-conscious about sharing this place with a guest. What if one of us has to use the bathroom? I offered to let Yuvi (a coworker and consummate couch-surfer) sleep on my floor but, as you can see, there is only barely floor enough to sleep on. Yuvi managed to get a solid 10 hours on that tile floor, so /his/ comfort bound is clearly much lower than mine.
Anyway, here are some photos. Note the one-piece bathroom sink and toilet in the shower enclosure.
I love how these double-decker trams look, and I loved riding on them. But we’re in typhoon country — how well can they handle in the wind?
Believe it or not, this was not my idea. I’ve been spending a fair bit of time with Quebecois coworker Marc and his boyfriend, and they turn out to be aspiring fishkeepers and wanted to visit Tung Choi Street (which was close to the restaurant we were at anyway.)
As is always my experience in Asia, there were lots of shops specializing in freshwater invertebrates and Amano-style planted tanks (my bag!) and a much stronger tendency to treat fish as ‘stuff’ rather than as ‘living stuff’ (not so much my bag.) The shopkeepers are also understandably discouraging of photographs, presumably because they’re sick of having their narrow aisles clogged with tourists who are definitely not going to buy anything.
Not pictured: Many beautiful planted tanks, including one that was 12-or-so feet wide and full of Cryptocorynes that must’ve taken years to grow; Caridina shrimp in every possible color; A giant tank full of what must have been $US100,000 worth of Asian arowana.
So far I’ve been spending most of my time in Tsim Sha Tsui near the hotel and conference center, but last night I mustered a group of colleagues to cab to the other end of Kowloon to visit the literally-named Pig Baby Shop. I was modestly anxious about the trip because up until late in the day I thought I’d arranged for us to visit a different, highly-reviewed shop called ‘Piggy Grill‘ but after several cryptic emails with the owner finally clued into the fact that Piggy Grill is out of business and Pig Baby Shop made the canny but creepy choice to hijack the URL of a defunct-but-well-regarded restaurant. (See, for yourself… visit piggygrill.com and seconds later you’ll be browsing pigbabyshop.com).
Anyway, much to my relief the place did exist and was indeed a suckling-pig restaurant, not a casino or bar or gang of bandits standing under a pig-shaped pirate flag.
pig, on arrival
Ordering was fun, like singing a children’s song: “One pig, one duck, two pigeons…”
My photos, alas, are not great. There were 11 of us and I managed to crop nearly everyone out of the shot. Also, the food arrived gradually so there’s no footage of total spread.
I guess I’ve never faced a suckling pig before, so I’m not clear if we got just the tasty bits or if we got /all/ of the pig and all they have is tasty bits. It was quite a bit like the first course of a peking duck — just crispy skin and sweet sauce, no actual meat or bones to distract from the fat.
Pig, seconds later
For me the highlight of the trip was that it was in Sham Shui Po, which is a real neighborhood that looks like a real city! I’ve been spending too much time in shopping centers and university campuses, it was nice to see some serious streets and buildings. This was much more how I’d envisioned Kowloon — dilapidated buildings covered in gated shops crammed together with moving sidewalks and escalators rolling in every direction.
Me in Sham Shui Po, posing in front of a dozen or so city busses
These guys are stuck to the side of a flowerpot in an otherwise unoccupied aquarium. They are a few mm across and don’t seem to get any bigger. The ones I’ve been watching don’t seem to be hatching either; the shattered ball in the last photo was damaged when I rearranged the pot for a better view.
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I’ve sort of always wanted a brass-body guitar, and I will take any opportunity to ride on a ferry boat. So when I found a nickel-plated guitar for sale on Craigslist that required a ferry ride to purchase I couldn’t resist.
The guy selling the guitar, Billy, lives in Vallejo California. There’s a commuter ferry that runs there from San Francisco. My friend Denise excitedly offered to accompany me on the boat ride, immediately after saying of Vallejo “I hear it’s a real shithole”.
The ferry ride was very nice — comfy boat with lots of good views of islands and bridges and whatnot. Also windy.
The Vallejo ferry building is also very nice — we met Billy there and he proved very long-winded so we ended up settling into a waterfront cafe that also seemed very nice. At one point I asked him if he could suggest a nice walk in Vallejo and he made a lot of very uncomfortable faces and at last delicately described his hometown as “The anus of California” and left me with the impression that if we were to walk in any direction from the ferry terminal we would be immediately sapped and robbed. So instead we just sat in the cafe and enjoyed the view which, I admit, consisted strictly of industrial ruins.
Billy turns out to be Billy Ray Martin, formerly of country act ‘Red River’, and even more formerly Bill Martin of punk band (Impatient) youth whose music I’ve been listening to a bit since our meeting.
The guitar is a ‘Johnson,’ a Chinese reproduction of a National tricone from the 30’s. Billy transplanted some actual National resonators into it and generally tricked it out so that it sounds extra good. It is also extremely shiny!
It turns out that I have not spontaneously learned to play slide guitar in the intervening decade since I last played one of these… but even if it winds up a wall-hanger it can’t be beat.
