Hong Kong : Day 003

today has been a day of normalizations. well. sort of. the kids woke up around 1:30 a.m. and it took about an hour and a half and some benadryl to convince them it was still sleepy time, but after that, they slept until a much more normal 7ish. they also did not do the narcoleptic thing during the day today except for a brief 15 minutes in which quinny was oblivious to everything around him.

we had a productive day in that we got to look at 3 different apartments. it was a lot of fun to look at apartments, but even though we purged and purged and purged, we have too much crap! we flew with 7 suitcases and we shipped 23 crates. we will be able to keep/fit about a tenth of this. all of the apartments we saw today are HUGE by hong kong standards, and there is still no way we will fit our stuff. we looked at another property in the other main village on lamma island, and while it was again a big, spacious, inexpensive property, it just won't work. it is not isolated like the one we saw yesterday...in fact, the four houses next to it have strollers and playscapes around them, so we know there would be lots of kids to play with, but it took (not kidding) about 20 flights of stairs STRAIGHT up to get to the house. since the kids and i will be alone for about a third of the week, i just can't see this particular house working b/c it'd be virtually impossible to deal with two kids and groceries on those stairs. we did really love the village, though, and are looking for other apartments closer to sea level :-)

we, again, had an incredible lunch while we were on lamma island (taz, i got a pic for you...just have to find the damn USB cable)...this time it was scallops in a chile sauce. it was DIVINE. there is this style of fried rice here called yeung chow, and i LOVE it! it's delicious...so we got the scallops and that rice. mmmm!

we are finding that mundane chores here are just very different from back home. laundry...there is a coin facility here, but it's actually cheaper and faster to take it to a cleaners, which we did. dishes...um, there are four place settings and two pots with two burners...so, dishes are simple but we have to do them immediately or we won't have anything to eat off of or with ;-p cleaning...this one is taken care of for us b/c we are in a serviced apartment. this is VERY nice!

this afternoon, we went to a big play ground in happy valley right around 5 and we found all those expats we were told were in this area. okay, correction, we found the expat children and their aiyahs for the most part. we did see a couple of american moms with their kids, but you know what, they were pretty unfriendly. the aiyahs and the children they were managing were very friendly, though. livie made a friend today, which is just HUGE considering her recent trend toward shyness (totally new to her). quinny made a nuisance of himself trying to steal a local boy's bike and a french expat boy's toy car. he was not at all bothered by the fact that his advances were unwanted, though :-)

tonight, i ran out to get some frozen yogurt for the kids, and i had my first embarrassing new-in-this-country moment. i took all the HK coins we had gathered up to pay for the yogurt and assumed i'd have enough. coins here are very different from coins in the u.s...there are far more coins than small bills, and i had just under 60 HK dollars in coins. our yogurt came to 57 dollars and some change (that is HK dollars...the conversion is somewhere around 14 cents on the dollar if you want to figure it out in u.s. dollars)...it was painstaking and embarrassing to count out all those coins only to find i'd done it WRONG and had to dig a few more out of my pockets to actually pay for the yogurt. the teenage girls that were handling my order were polite and helpful, but i am sure they got a good giggle/conversation out of my ignorance when i left :-)

we are feeling more and more comfortable with the area around our apartment and with navigating some of the public transport options that are available. we took the subway for the first time today, and in the next couple days, we need to master some bus and tram schedules so that the kids and i know what we are doing next week when josh goes into the office. the traffic here is INSANE. i am so glad to have all these public transport options and to not have to even consider driving in any way, shape, or form. i can barely handle the lack of yellow stripes to indicate two-way traffic and/or the driving on the left side of the road as a pedestrian...can't imagine what a wreck i'd be if i was actually driving!

look at that...it's 8ish and it's time to get the monkeys to bed. ahhh...nice to be back to a more normal schedule...let's just hope the nocturnal playtime doesn't occur again tonight.