Apartment update
We've been in our new place about 6 weeks now and it hasn't been without problems. However, it's all good now. Long story short, our landlord ended up replacing all the pipes in the apartment (tub, sinks, toilets). We had toilets flooding, blocked drains and filthy water, but it's all fixed now. Here's a picture of the bamboo scaffolding the workers erected outside our apartment and hovered 27 floors over the city streets as they did our pipe work.

Also, I've included a picture of the christmas decorations out front of our building. They really did up the communal park of our City Garden complex which is good because there's no Christmas decorations IN our apartment. Just Mark's natural Christmas cheer.


Kadoorie Farms
Last Sunday, we took a drive with Alexis and Rob and their fancy pancy BMW convertible.

Our destination was a little known tourist park called Kadoorie Farms which is now a sustainable farm and wildlife refuge. The farm started back in the 1950's to help about 300,000 Chinese refugee farmers get on their feet. The refugees have moved on to their own farms by now and Kadoorie Farms is still a working farm, but more scenic and educational.


Then we drove to the scenic fishing town of Sai Kung and had a delicious seafood dinner. (Yep, that's fish head on in my chopsticks, but i didn't really eat it.) Sai Kung has got a great boardwalk where all the restaurants line up with their giant seafood tanks out front. Here's a family checking out the horseshoe crabs allowed to crawl around by the restaurant to get attention. And, here's one of many giant tanks of the various fish destined to be someone's dinner later that night.

Horse Racing
Later in the week, we went to the horse races. Horse racing is the biggest sport in Hong Kong and the local gamblers take it very seriously. The rest of us go to hang out in the beer garden and place random bets. I won $115 on blind luck. I couldn't see much of the races from the beer garden, but I could see the jockey's trot by pre and post race. I couldn't get over how incredibly skinny the jockeys were. I'd seen Tobey Maguire in Seabiscuit but he was a bucket of lard compared to these real jockeys. They couldn't have weighed more than 75 pounds and of course are all under 5 ft tall (most were not Chinese). Just itty bitty emaciated athletes.