Picture the following scene!

You're visiting your dear and seldom seen Aunt who lives in the Cotswolds or Devon or some shit. She makes a big fuss of you and after some tea and Dundee cake you feel right at home. Just when you're kicking off your shoes preparing to vegetate in front of count down and update your Facebook status on your Blackberry you hear the old crone's reedy whine;

"Oooh, did I show you my holiday snaps, dear?"

If such a scenario makes your bowels spontaneously void with dread, or conjures up visions of you gnawing off your own metacarpals in disdain then you may want to skip by this blog post.

Essentially I'm going to be providing a brief account of our honeymoon travels with intermediate pictorial illustrations. While I'm aware of how banal and uninteresting it can be to read people's self-referential wanking on about their holidays I'll try and make the following as entertaining as possible.

Furthermore, given today's fast paced climate of instantaneous literary gratification you probably don't want to read anything too long and taxing so I'll break it down into short, concise episodes (obviously this quite long and elaborate introduction notwithstanding).

Part 1- Honk Kong

Personally I find flying long haul only marginally less uncomfortable than having my finger nails removed with pliers while a quintet of midgets rub powdered glass into my scrotum.
Breathing in several hundred people's recycled belches, sneezes and farts for twelve hours while a cataleptic stranger dribbles at your shoulder and digs their elbow into your ribs is not the ideal start to anyone's holiday! Nonetheless I was prepared to endure this torment as a necessary evil in order to experience the wonder of the orient.
Moreover we'd tried to blag our way into a free upgrade as the doe eyed honeymooners we were but the hard faced Cathay Pacific official glibly informed us that the flight was full.

Poo!

Suffice to say I didn't get a wink of sleep but fortunately the airline had a fine selection of films to keep me going. I whittled away the hours with;

* A frustratingly sanitised version of Watchmen- An adequate attempt to bring Alan Moore's iconic novel to life that (like V for Vendetta before it) lacked the depth and scope of its source material.

* Gran Torino- Trite, heavy handed and bordering on caricature at times but thoroughly entertaining nonetheless. While I'm not the biggest Clint fan he had some devastatingly cool lines here.

* Valkyrie- Tom Cruise manages to hold his own alongside such heavyweight thesps as Tom Wilkinson, Ken Branagh, Terrence Stamp and Bill Nighy (oh and, delightfully Eddie Izzard's in there as well). Reminded me that Tom Cruise is actually pretty damn good at his job even if he does believe that all negative emotions are caused by the ghosts of aliens that were dumped into volcanoes. The film's depiction of Klaus Von Stauffenberg was a little blinkered and why they didn't act the whole thing in German was beyond me as Cruise's accent and pronunciation are excellent in the opening scene!

* No Country For Old Men- Despite the meandering prose you can't take your eyes off it. Sterling performances all round and a profound reminder of why I love both the Coen brothers and Cormac McCarthy as much as a heterosexual newlywed can love another man.


Jetlagged and irate we arrived in Hong Kong after rigorous H1N1 screenings. By rigorous screenings I mean a card that essentially said;

"Do you have swine flu?

Yes /No"

When leaving the airport and arriving in town I'd like to say that the first thing we noticed was the monumental beauty of the architecture, the hurried but easy charm of the locals or the ruthless cleanliness of the streets.

It was, however the near crippling heat and humidity that first assailed us, coupled by the indefinable, sweetish, vaguely sweaty meat smell that seemed to permeate everywhere, emanating from innumerable restaurants, stalls and vendors.

Upon arrival at the hotel we had a little more luck blagging an upgrade and managed to rate a "superior room" (it had a heated towel rack!). After a quick nap to acclimatise to local time and shake off the jetlag we set about to explore and investigate.
Our hotel was situated on Kowloon bay and before entering Honk Kong island proper we had a scout around the locality;




















A fifteen minute walk led us to a thriving marketplace where everything from cheaply made fake designer t shirts to cheaply made fake designer watches could be obtained, and the trendy youngsters of Kowloon assembled to pass the time, shop and purchase foul but intriguing smelling snacks from less than sanitary street vendors.

Amongst the bustle of the marketplace were numerous sportswear, designer clothes and electronics outlets which we avoided, favouring the cheerfully tacky charm of what was called the ladies market. Excellently, we were also able to detect an undercurrent of sleaze with 'by the hour' hotels sharing space with sporting goods outlets and shoe shops.

It was from here that I purchased a Mooncake- a festival delicacy of Hong Kong (which, though out of season I was able to pick up quite easily). A Mooncake is a pastry delicacy about the size of a pork pie filled with lotus seed paste and the dried, whole yolks of salted duck's eggs. Eating Mooncake is an experience I can only liken to dining on a pastry covered brick made out of equal parts sugar, salt and fucking sand! How the Chinese make it to adulthood at all chomping on these as a matter of course is a mystery for me.

Speaking of food, Hong Kong is an essential visit for the gourmand. The famous Chinese saying 'If it has it's back to the sun, we'll eat it" is in full effect here and if a menu boasting jellied pig's knuckle or pickled goat's scrotum is likely to make you queasy then there are a great many blander alternatives more suitable to the western palate.
Those expecting sweet and sour chicken or beef satay may be in for a rude awakening, though and visiting China is a jarring reminder at how homogenised what we consider Chinese food actually is.
By rule of thumb one's enjoyment of a meal is in directly inverse proportion to how much one considers the ingredients that make it up, and I can honestly say that abiding by this I never had a bad meal there.
There is one staple delicacy, however that always eluded me and that was the simple Congee (a porridge of rice usually including eggs, seed pastes, vegetables, fish and / or meat) which I avoided devoutly purely because of the fact that it looked like a bowl of semen with bits of dead animal and green stuff floating in it.





Meh. No thanks!


There's still a great deal to appeal to the unenlightened though. Such western favorites as Peking duck are abundantly available and you've never tasted char siu until you've been to Hong Kong!

And if, like myself, you're a dim sum fanatic then you can find exquisite steamed balls of delicious non-specific meats pretty much everywhere you look at more than reasonable prices.

Our first two days were spent simply taking in the vastness in scale and grandeur of this unique and disparate country.

Indeed, our first visit to Hong Kong island itself (easily accessible on the cheap-as-chips Star Ferry) was spent wandering the streets agog, staring in wonderment at the sky tickling monuments to wealth, commerce and finance that towered over us.

Hong Kong is a paragon of finance, industry and wealth in stark contrast to the relative poverty traditionally associated with mainland China.

The very opulence of the island makes it hard to imagine the time barely half a century ago when the British colony was a hotbed of crippling poverty, organised crime, drug pandemics and prostitution.


NEXT

People, Pandas, and Engrish!

P.S.  You'll find a nice new cartoon waiting for you over at Supersillyous!