Dumplings at the Din Tai Fung in Hong Kong. Caleb can eat at least one whole one, and he especially loved the spoon in the kiddie set they gave him. If you don't yet know the pleasures of a good xiao lung bao, please call me so we can arrange to have lunch at the Din Tai Fung in Arcadia. Seriously.
Hong Kong - long known in Asia for making movies since the early 1930's, but probably best known in the west for its genre of cop movies in the 80's & 90's - has its own Avenue of the Stars along the waterfront in Kowloon.
Temple Street Night Market. Every night, about a mile of Temple Street is closed for this market, which has little tented vendors selling everything from tchokes to knock-off clothes (I loved the Paul Frank pj shorts, in which the monkey is winking), to purses, baby clothes, golf bags, cell phone accessories... you name it, you can bargain for it here.
There are also these little open-air "restaurants" (and I use that term loosely) where you can choose fresh seafood and watch them cook it in a wok right there on the street. Seating is these little tables and kid stools. It means you take turns eating while one of you holds the squirming baby (the aisles of the night market are too narrow for a stroller - Wil has strong arms), but on a warm night, the atmosphere of the crowded market, some spicy flash fried shrimp and a cold Tsing Tao feels like the essence of Hong Kong.
And lastly, this is why I now know what the inside of a hospital in Hong Kong looks like. Two days before we left, CJ began running a low-grade fever. We battled it with the Motrin I had brought with me for his teething, but it hoovered around the 100 degree mark, occasionally spiking as high as 102.5. One night I wound up in a cool bath with him at 2am. I was nervous about trying to get on a 12-hour flight home with him like this - in Hong Kong as you are leaving the airport, the last thing they do after you clear customs and immigration and are headed for a taxi/subway, is this: a man in scrubs and a paper face masks shoots your baby's forehead for his temperature before they let you out (hey, this is a country where SARS started, after all).
We couldn't get the fever down and I was running out of Motrin. Apparently, ibuprofen is not sold over the counter in Hong Kong. I didn't want to risk 1) not being let on the plane and 2) his fever spiking over 102 while on the plane, so we jumped in a taxi and headed to St. Theresa's, which is probably the nicest hospital I've ever been in (just in case you are ever in HK and need a good hospital!).
So that was the end of our trip. He just wouldn't be my kid if we didn't get to tour the hospital too!
Hey Karen! You know what's funny is that the night before we left HK, a couple of really Fobby Korean girls who didn't speak either English or Chinese were trying to explain to us that they were trying to get directions to the street of stars! Lol! Now it all makes sense! (It's ok, I think we pointed them in the right direction!) Hahaha!
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