Who?!
Yeah, I don’t know what happened. One minute, I’m in KL at Reggae Mansion’s rooftop bar in the middle of the night, talking to a Swedish guy who just got back from Penang. The next minute, he’s coming with me to Hong Kong.
Wharney Guang Dong: A+ I know secondhand that the hostels in Hong Kong are the worst in the world, namely anything in the Chungking Mansions in Kowloon. Even locals avoid that area and from what I’ve heard, “slums” would be putting it mildly. So a few months ago, I got on agoda and booked the Wharney Guang Dong hotel for $386 for 3 days. That included their expansive and tasty buffet breakfast.
Remember Jessica?! We met her for dinner in Times Square at “SML” and our burgers were “meh”.
Monday, February 4th: Breakfast with Eric. Monday morning we met my friend Eric for breakfast at the Flying Pan, an all-day breakfast-type diner practically next door to our hotel. The logo is a frying pan with wings on it. Next to the clock on the wall it says “Time Fries”. We wondered if an Asian or Western person had come up with the name and phrase on the wall. We speculated that the diner was opened by an interracial couple and that the Western half had asked, “What should we call it?” To which the Asian half of the couple mispronounced frying pan. “Flying pan? You want to call it ‘flying pan’?” And so the diner was named.
After breakfast, Viktor was set free to roam the streets of Hong Kong and I followed Eric back to his apartment to pick up a suitcase I’d mailed from Singapore a few months before. At the time, I thought I’d be traveling through Vietnam and needed to lighten my load. Around $100 and two months later, the bag was safely at Eric’s.
Dinner with Chip! Guess who we met for dinner?! Yay, Chip! We met at a chinese place in Central and had pigeon.
She remembered that I don’t like people posing with peace signs in pics and promptly broke out her little fingers. Viktor asked why so many Asians pose this way and Chip answered, “It’s cute!” I said I imagine photo albums full of pictures of peace signs. Chip said, “Yes. That’s right.” She then showed me 10 hand signs specifically for photographs, which correspond to numbers. Of course, the peace sign is “2”. Here we are posing with “10”:
I love Chip’s fashion:
Monday, February 4th: Fishing Village with Bing One of my HK blog followers messaged me, offering to walk Viktor and me around the Lei Yue Mun fishing village here in Hong Kong. We met Bing at the Yau Tong MTR station and walked around for a couple hours.
I photographed a number of stray dogs as we walked through the village. They all had sad, defeated, pathetic looks in their eyes; nothing like the bright-eyed, confident dogs of the US. The strays wouldn’t let me get too close to them before darting away. My trick for getting them to look at me: cat impressions.
We walked through the markets and residential streets. Thanks to Bing for taking us around this interesting a quaint pocket of Hong Kong!
O hi, Asia! 
hey friend! Love your blogs, really great reading!! You’re so clever……
Thanks, honey. I’m a little behind (this one took two weeks to finally post!) Stay tuned for something more recent. (Hint, hint.)
definitely will do!! great times…great times…..
one more thought…The “Flying Pan” analogy was too funny!!
If an Asian person named the diner, it’s cute. If a Westerner named it…it’s basically racist.
The pictures do make the post come alive. By the way, my dog Yoshi can look just as sad and pathetic as any Vietnamese dog, just saying.
The dog in the first pic with head cocked is a beauty. Odd to see the new boat in with the old ones! Flying pan…lol…sounds like something a mad housewife would call it.
How was the Flying Pan? I’ve seen the sign 1000 times while going up the escalators but have never been in.
That must be another location – we were at the one in Wan Chai on Lockhart Rd. That said, it was delish and the portions were HUGE. A nice Western food break for if you’re noodled out. 🙂