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Hanging in Hong Kong
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Whilst far from being a genius like Stephen Hawking, John Nash or Geri Halliwell, I do like to think I've a wee bit of intelligence. However, something strange happened to me at Hong Kong airport. I got to an ATM, withdrew some cash and got some coupons for a free cup of coffee thrown in to the bargain. For some reason, this really excited me and thanking my good fortune put the cash, (and my precious coupons) into my travel wallet along with my bank cards. With my mind now firmly fixed on claiming my latte I forgot to secure the zip where my cards were, and owing to the position of the wallet, as I walked, the cards would have fell down and out the bottom of my trousers, like James Garner getting rid of the mud in The Great Escape. Curse you gravity, curse you Newton, curse you free cup of coffee, this is everybody else's fault but mine. The real rub is that I'm not even that keen on coffee, but stick the word "free" in front of anything and I'll lap it up like a baby on Ostermilk.
We stayed in the Kowloon area, which is one of the most densley populated places in the world. Busy, bright and bustling it was everything I expected Hong Kong to be. We took a walk to the Temple Street night market, where we had some food. Usually, we've found that some of the most delicious food is to be had from street vendors and unlikely looking places. However, there's exceptions to every rule and we had a pretty grim piece of beef and rice in the company of some local drug addicts and ne'er-do-wells.
We went to the races one night at Sha Tin. It coincided with being on the same day as the 1st day of the Cheltenham Festival, where I've usually Sha Tout. The first race, didn't get a sausage. Second race I went for a likely looking cuddy by the name of Star of Northern. Halfway through the race, it's nowhere and just as I'm shouting "I hope you get used for glue, ya useless, big tooth bast..." it starts galloping up the field to win. This started a good run of luck for me and by the end of the night I'd made enough cash to hopefully pay for a ticket for the Rugby World Cup Sevens which was on here later in the week.
There's plenty to see and do. We took a ferry over to HK Island, which is where the skyscrapers are and you can get a great view of the skyline from the Peak. If it's not cloudy. Which it was. Plenty of museums, the Hong Kong Museum of History is particularly interesting, we didn't give ourselves enough time there, unfortunatley.
We delayed our flights for a day to allow us to go to the rugby. As we didn't have tickets and the event was officially Sold Out, we were relying on a tout. As soon as we left the underground station, we were approached by a Manc (they have to be from Manchester by law, some sort of Tout Union deal, I believe) who kindly swapped my winnings from the races for a ticket. Had a great day, Scotland won all 3 games (is this some sort of World Cup first??) E*gland lost to France and I led the crowd in a rousing (i.e it roused a few people out of their seats to go sit elsewhere) version of Flower of Scotland. We were sat in amongst a load of Kiwi's and a couple of them said if Scotland ran in 4 tries in our game and NZ ran in 8 in theirs, they would do the haka if I sang FoS. As it was about 8 o'clock in the evening, (we'd been in there since about 9.30 that morning) I agreed and asking a couple of Scots on the end of the row for some help- well, what I actually said was "Scooz me, burr indin blah gurgle Haka issing Floroscolin" and when the fear went from their eyes, we sang. As Dan said, there's always one and it's usually me.
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