Tuesday, 18-11-2014. Day 90.
Dumplings ... and a Visit to the Clinic.
The rooms in our hotel are small — so small, in fact, our family of four needed two of them. Each room held a bed, a very narrow credenza mostly taken up by a large television, a tiny closet, and a very cramped bathroom. Unfortunately, there were no adjoining rooms, so our two rooms were across the hall from each other and we had to split up; a kid and an adult per room.
Our hotel is very tall, but the rooms are quite tiny.
After being in near-constant close proximity to each other for 89 days, this arrangement felt strange. When one of us woke up in the morning, we’d send a text to see if the occupants of the other room were awake. If there was no response, we just waited a little longer.
It wasn’t all that efficient, and Jackie, who loves to sleep in, benefited from this system. It meant that our mornings got off to a later start that we were used to, but we weren’t really in any sort of rush and our agenda for most days was light, so a late start was fine.
The first morning we woke, after getting organized, Jackie had spent a little time scouring TripAdvisor for food options and discovered a nearby Din Tai Fung. So she was hungry for dumplings — but we’re pretty much always hungry for Din Tai Fung dumplings.
We walked over the Olympic Steps to the restaurant, which was about 15 minutes away, and had an early lunch. Verdict: this one wasn’t as good as Singapore or Los Angeles (Arcadia, naturally), but better than Sydney.
The welcoming embrace of the Din Tai Fun Dumpling Guy.
After lunch, we walked around and explored Hong Kong for a little bit, checking out a few interesting shops and picking up some snacks for the rooms to help stave off early morning tummy rumblings.
But Sam still wasn’t feeling all that great, so we went back to the hotel and she relaxed while the girls did homework. Our Internet connection in Bali had been somewhat unreliable, but here it was solid, so we caught up on some Khan Academy math lessons.
When the evening rolled around, we met Sam’s friend Wendy for dinner. She took us to a nearby hot pot restaurant, and it was good food and good fun. Although the girls were a little startled (perhaps horrified) to find a chicken foot at the bottom of the broth after we’d eaten dinner.
After eating, I took the girls back to the hotel while Wendy was kind enough to take Sam to the doctor where she was diagnosed with a respiratory infection — we suspect it’s a result of the poor air quality in Bali (though we learned later she contracted Whooping Cough while we worked on a farm in Western Australia) — and she came home with a whole mess of medication. Check out review of her visit to a Hong Kong clinic.
Notable Statistics:
Dumplings consumed: 36
Olympic steps climbed: 29
Math skills mastered: 15
Tom Fassbender is a writer of things with a strong adventurous streak. He also drinks coffee.
