Freezing my a** off in HK

I'm back from Hong Kong! The S.O. and I had a wonderful time in HK and we already miss the place. We missed it so much that we headed to Hong Kong Cafe (in SG) the day after we returned home for dinner and to reminisce about our trip. LOL.

The weather in HK was great. Most days, the temperature hovered around 15 degrees and we were perfectly comfortable with some layering, a scarf and a jacket. I love winter fashion! Sweater, knee-length jacket, scarf and boots - sooooo nice - but totally impractical for Singapore's weather :(

The shopping wasn't all that fantastic, because 90% of the clothes on sale were unsuitable for SG's climate. There was a huge variety of boots and bags, though. The number of designs available was mind-boggling. The S.O. had to keep reminding me that the material used (kind of like suede/velvet) wasn't waterproof and would be hard to keep clean in SG, so I (very unwillingly) restricted myself to just 2 pairs of boots and 2 bags.

We had a field day at Esprit Warehouse though. The place was huge (at least twice the size of the Esprit @ Raffles City) and prices were good: $22+ for men's shirts, $25+ for sweaters, $30+ for pants. They also had a few racks of "samples" for really low prices. I managed to get a shirt I was eyeing in SG (retail price - $79) for just $20! My colleague brought us to a Timberland sample sale in SG before, according to him the manufacturers usually make a few pieces of each design as "samples" before the items go for mass production. I guess I was pretty lucky to be able to get a piece in my size! In all, we spent around $175 in Esprit for 4 shirts, 1 jacket, 1 pair of pants & 1 keychain. Not too shabby, I'd say :)

One thing that struck us when we were in HK was the large variety available for almost everything. A typical teahouse (cha2 can1 ting1) in HK has an A3 size menu with hundreds of items available, and we're talking about "normal" teahouses the size of a typical 1-storey shophouse unit in SG. We were really spoilt for choice. The variety is huge even at fast food joints like McDonald's, Fairwood and Yoshinoya. At McD's, they have 3 kinds of foldovers (vs. our miserable 1 grilled chicken foldover), and at Yoshinoya, they have 12 items on their regular menu, not to mention breakfast sets, tea sets, and special items. It might seem silly that we ate at fast food joints while in HK, but the stuff there was too special to resist. For e.g., at Yoshinoya, the S.O. tried their tobiko & salmon rice bowl and I had a mushroom, tofu and beef sukiyaki set. Yes, sukiyaki! The beef was really fresh (you had to cook it yourself) and the set came with a small burner to keep the soup boiling throughout the meal.

The variety didn't stop at the food and clothing. Even their transport choices were pretty impressive. Travelling around, we could choose between their MTR, bus, tram (reminded me of Kung-Fu Hustle, haha) and cross-harbour ferry, mini-buses, taxis and railway. Tram and ferry rides were inexpensive and fun - only around $0.45 per trip! All their public transport was really crowded though - with a population of 6 million, I wasn't really surprised.

I guess the folks in HK demand variety, and the service providers are able to provide it because the population can sustain it - economies of scale and all that.

Oh, and we found out about this cool MTR promotion known as the "fare saver" scheme. If you're at a shopping centre that has a fare saver machine, just wave your Octopus card (it's like our Transitlink card) on the scanner and you'll save HK$2 (around $0.45) on your next MTR trip! So cool! It's like the shopping centre is giving you a rebate for frequenting their complex. It would be nice if we had that in SG :)

Enough of my trip for now, haha, I'll post some pics when I get the chance. My friend Chong told me about flickr and I'll probably try to use it to post my KL and HK pics.