Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [86]
The lobby provides a mixed preview. Large, colorful paintings by children hang on two walls, cheerful in their welcome but definitely not luxe hotel art. The café in one nook is a self-service, fast-food operation. No comfortable lounging quarters, concierge desk, Versace shop, or, of course, bar. But the reception desk brims with smiling young men and women smartly dressed in business attire. One of them registers us and gives us card keys for a room on the top, sixteenth, floor.
Bill unlocks the door and ushers Cheryl into a plainly furnished sitting area reminiscent of a Ramada. The sofa and matching upholstered chair look comfortable, at least, and there are little amenities like a TV, coffee maker, minibar, and fruit basket. Cheryl wanders to the other end of the parlor, opens the drapes covering floor-to-ceiling windows, and says, gasping, “God Almighty! Look at this.” The view bowls us over, encompassing a vast sweep of the harbor and, beyond the water, the high-rise towers of Hong Kong Island and Victoria Peak. By the next day, we can even pick out the Excelsior Hotel in the panorama, where the view that stunned us before wasn’t nearly this grand.
The wall of windows continues into the spacious bedroom, curving gently in an arc around to the far side of the corner suite, giving us in all about four hundred square feet of vista wrapping around the king-size bed. An IMAX screen pales in comparison. Next door, the opulent Peninsula Hotel, visible in full, rises above us, helping to inspire the Y’s advertising boast that “The Neighborhood Could Not Be Better.”
“Look at those puny windows,” Bill says, pointing to the classy edifice, “and how much farther back they are from the water. The cheapest room over there with just a peephole view costs about three times what we’re paying, and the penthouse, which seems to have the only comparable sights to ours, runs U.S.$5,000 per night.”
“Be right back,” Cheryl declares on her way to the bathroom. She returns momentarily with a wrapped bar of soap in each hand. “Not just one, but two. I think we’ll be able to make do.”
Hong Kong doesn’t excite us in advance as much as most of our stops. None of our memories of the city put us off, but as a fast-moving contemporary metropolis, it’s less fresh and novel to us than other places. It probably wouldn’t have made the itinerary at all except for being the best Asian transit spot to our next two destinations, the Chinese mainland city of Chaozhou, where we will visit friends, and Cape Town, South Africa. India is closer than Hong Kong to Cape Town, of course, but there aren’t any ONEworld airline flights between them, the reason we’re zigzagging east to west and back again going from Bangkok to Mumbai to Hong Kong.
Only two activities really interest us in Hong Kong: walking the streets, as much a priority here as in New York or London, and eating good Chinese food. After admiring our view for most of an hour, we go outside and head north on Nathan Road, the Kowloon Peninsula’s main thoroughfare, sometimes called in tourism talk “the Golden Mile.” The fancy shops don’t entice us because our focus—other than stretching our legs and looking around—concerns practical needs: some extra microcassette tapes for our recorder, over-the-counter Excedrin migraine pills for Cheryl, and a computer center where we can burn our digital photos onto a CD for a backup copy. It seems as if all three should be available along the crowded commercial strip, but we find only the tapes.
Our walk takes us up to the Temple Street Night Market, where vendors are just beginning to set up for the evening. Most of the merchandise here wouldn’t appeal to us, but the food stalls would. Not knowing when they’ll open, though, we decide to catch a cab back toward the harbor for dinner at City Chiu Chow, which looked good earlier in the afternoon on a quick inspection. It promises a foretaste of the cooking of Chaozhou, which the Cantonese call Chiu Chow. The regional style