Today Kei and I started our day with some food to be ready for ice-skating. I ate a nice bowl of Udon and Kei had some Congee and then we headed out to ice-skate. Yes, ice-skating in the middle of summer. Actually we had wanted to go ice-skating in Korea, but we never got to go, so this time we had to.
I hadn’t been ice-skating for over 10 years, so I worried a bit and although I found it very difficult at the beginning (and fell down twice in the first half hour) I quickly picked it up and felt more at ease on the ice. We skated for two full hours but by the end there were so many people. The children that were at the rink when we arrived were very good and were showing off their pirouttes, but the children that arrived later were mostly still learning and so they often fell down and every time a kid fell down I got so scared that I would skate over their fingers, so I wasn’t able to skate very fast at that point, too scared that I wouldn’t be able to stop in case a kid fell down (which often happened). Yet we had fun.
When we were done skating we went back to where I live, Causeway Bay, to meet Kei’s Mother and have some late lunch with her. Kei and I weren’t very hungry so we just a bit. I had a Vietnamese Coconut drink, that I will definitely look for as soon as I get back to Europe, it was just too delicious! Unfortunately I didn’t get a photo with Kei’s mother this time, but it was fun to see how similar she looked to Kei, it was like seeing and older version of Kei.
After Lunch Kei’s mother went to Ikea and Kei and I went clothes shopping. By dinner time we met up with some of Kei’s friends from primary school and had dinner together until 1am. They were very nice and the more they ate and drank the better English they had. They were very interested to hear about Europe and I got invited home to the bride (two of them are getting married in December and Kei and Isabella (the other girl we ate with) will be the bridesmaids) for dinner at her family’s house this upcoming Wednesday.
I was glad to finally be able to meet some of Kei’s friends that she talked a lot about when we were in Korea.
They accompanied me home to my hostel to have a look around as they were very interested to see what it looked like and on the way home we saw 2 cockroaches. I must admit that it was the first time I’ve really seen a cockroach (yes, I know, I must have lived a very sheltered life) but I didn’t get surprised at all. I think I’ve come to accept a lot of things in Hong Kong as natural. Because Hong Kong has such a high concentration of people everywhere is busy and every space is fully used, and if it isn’t, whatever is there is torn down to leave place for something else. It’s a city that constantly changes and a place where you are never alone, yet it all has a charm. I had expected that the feeling of never being alone might be slightly suffocating, but instead I find it revitalising. And besides, in Hong Kong, there is always something to do.