A Journey Begins

With all the travelling and time-zones, it’s hard to tell exactly how long it’s been since the wedding, but Stephen & I have been married for about a week and a half now, and our adventures have definitely begun

There’ll be more about the wedding day once I have photos and stuff. I expect that’ll come once we get home, but if anyone has any online, please do let me know!

We had a wonderful – if very tired! – wedding night in the Radisson. The view the next morning, from our balcony over Dublin Bay, was beautiful, and as for the room itself…! We managed to catch up with some of our guests at breakfast & check-out, which was fun – and we picked up the (intact) wedding cake, to bring back to mum’s freezer! (Thanks mum!)

Cork was a nice quiet break – we wandered in to the city on Saturday, did a small bit of shopping, and enjoyed a lovely meal at the Indian Palace. On Sunday, we joined Rick & Siobhan for lunch – great chats, great company – thanks guys!

Monday night was spent in our ‘new’ home, together, unpacking, repacking, tidying (a little!), and generally getting ready for new shores. Tuesday morning was wet and dreary, but we had a lovely flight – including some amusement when I heard Ger’s voice, and realised that Ronan was sitting in the seat I’d originally been assigned (BMI assigned me to 16B, and Stephen to 15E – we decided to pick slightly closer seats when checking in!) They were on a not-so-secret spy mission – although apparently it was really a new kitchen they were after, and not paparazzi photos of us

Tuesday night saw us enjoying a thoroughly Wicked time at the theatre – what a brilliant show! Wednesday managed to top it, with a fabulous dinner at Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant at Claridges, including a tour of the kitchens! Many thanks to Diane for that one – we really enjoyed it. (And a tip for anyone in the general Bond St area – go in to Claridges, walk upstairs, and call the lift. There’s not just a bell-boy… There’s a couch in there!) Neither of us can currently remember what we did on Thursday – I think by then, we were just knackered! The Science Museum got a visit (although a lot of what we wanted to see was closed), and we tried to get in to the Reading Room in the British Museum, but the exhibition going on there was tickets-only, and all sold out. Friday was mostly spent shopping, before we headed out to the airport.

The 12+hr flight was mildly torturous, but I reckon that now we’ve gone through that, we can survive anything Stephen watched movies, I fought with the airplane to find a comfortable position in which to get more than seven seconds continuous sleep. We arrived in Hong Kong at some evening-ish hour, and managed to get past the temperature-screening, immigration, customs, and the vast array of transport options, to our suite in the Eaton Hotel. Hurrah! The bus trip from the Airport Express station to our hotel assured us that Hong Kong had well and truly discovered neon – and as far as I can tell, seems to regard it as the solution to AIDS/world hunger/global warming.

Once we were settled in, we visited the Club Floor briefly, for a drink and some down-time. Bed followed very shortly thereafter. Sunday morning saw us up unhealthily early, with Stephen suffering from nasty sinus problems, and both of us generally jet-lagged. Walking up Nathan Road towards the MTR, it really hit home. We were in Hong Kong. It’s such a completely different city to anywhere we’re used to – but it’s very endearing all the same. We really enjoyed visiting CCI, but had to come home and sleep for a few hours as soon as it was over! Jet lag’s just a killer.

Once we woke up, we tried out the cocktails & canapes in the E-Club (mneh), then wandered out to the Night Market – wow Stall after stall of everything you could imagine. We only saw about half of it – but there’s a lot of repeats, and really, by that stage, we were done. I bought a pair of really-not-Crocs, for 590HKD (about a fiver), and went in to a nearby dispensary for some anti-histamine cream (I’d gotten a couple of insect bits) – but mostly, we decided that we’d wait a day or two, see what the rest of Hong Kong had to offer, before buying lots of stuff! On the way back to the hotel, we decided against buying any dried octopus/mushrooms/lizards, and stopped in to McDonalds.

Today, we made it down to breakfast in the E-Club – a mostly-tasty experience. Then it was time for another nap – jet-lag’s still got us both destroyed – before venturing out in search of a map. We managed to navigate the bookshop well enough – although we were functionally illiterate! Unfortunately, any maps we could find with English-sorted indexes were so covered in Chinese symbols as to be completely unusable. After that, we bough Octopus cards, and headed down to Tsim Sha Tsui, to check out the shopping. Stephen, by now, was impossibly flopsy, so we gave up on shopping before really seeing anything, booked our trip on the Duk Ling for Saturday, and took the Star Ferry over to Central Hong Kong. The journey was rather surreal – a city of skyscrapers emerging from a slight haze, over the water. Then it was a MTR train back to Kowloon, and our hotel – where we are now

In case I haven’t mentioned this before, the jet lag’s a killer! Time for another nap, I think – then we might explore the other half of the Night Market, and see what Tuesday brings!