Cosima Underwater

One hour later, our neighbor came home and I helped him to chase Elsie away. She was obstinate, to say the least. She left remnants. Three in neighbor’s garden. Four heaps in mine.

Yesterday we went to the flower market in Mong Kok, which is a classical Asian shopping experience as it consists of 50 or so shops and stalls crammed into a very small area. It’s very convenient shopping, as you don’t have to walk far to see what the selection and prices are at the competition.

Lots of other people had the same idea. The sidewalks were  crammed with people buying late Chinese New Year flowers.

I however was after this…

To put in here…

Last week I removed a lot of weeds, bougainvillea roots, and a lot of…

Now I have  so many seeds that I better prepare the neighboring bed as well…

Other girls buy handbags, I buy plants. Although I was strictly on a seed buying mission, I couldn’t resist buying this strange creature…

It’s a staghorn fern that in the wild takes it’s nutrients from the bark of trees (in the back are pomelos). So I plan to put the fern up there…

Next to the flower market is the bird market. It’s housed in a very nice building surrounded by a traditional Chinese garden. I loved looking at the  Chinese wooden cages, at all the colorful birds, and little man and I squeaked with delighted horror as we discovered the stall selling live grasshoppers. Some stalls however take hygiene a bit too lightly… it smelled, bird poo was mounting in the cages, and I had the urge to open them.

Please excuse the wobbles, I took the video with my phone.

Birds and grasshoppers were not the last fauna we encountered yesterday. When we came home, I noticed a very strong smell in the garden, then we heard some rustling and cracking up the hill behind our house. Urghh… burglars?

No, it was Elsie, having a late night snack. This morning I caught her on camera munching in our neighbor’s garden with long-neck birdie waiting for insects attracted by her not-so-Parisian smell. Elsie is a wild buffalo that roams through countryside and gardens with her mates. Later I saw three of her friends holding up traffic on the main village road. Yep, I live in the boonies, but the skyscrapers are only half an hour away.

Life is a string of knots, and freedom is unraveling the knot and moving on to the next.

We are all born into a subtle net of strings around us. I don’t think any of us is truly free. At times these strings become like a straight jacket from which we want to break free, but at other times we wrap ourselves in them for comfort,  security, and guidance. We need them. Without them our lives would be empty.

I look at other people’s life and don’t understand there motivations, their strings, don’t understand why they scramble like mad to achieve things that for me have no meaning, and I am sure the same happens the other way around.

I am bound by my fears and weaknesses and bound by love and happiness. The strings in my head and in my heart will not go away. I find it very hard to decide which strings to hold onto and which one to slash, but I have comfort in knowing that I am not the only one having that problem.

Welcome to the year of the tiger, a marvelous beast at the brink of extinction. It’s going to be a powerful year, and I – in the hidden, quiet corners of my mind – have decided to survive.

Thank you all for your comments for the burglary post. We have ordered fake surveillance cams. Going forward I will call the police when I see assumed banana thieves. I have installed a timer for one of the living room lamps, it goes on at 3am.  Sticks are jammed into the sliding doors, window bars are ordered, although I hate them. Charles, we don’t live in Sai Kung, that would be too convenient :). We live on the seventh island, over the seventh hill. The police wrote a very detailed report, found fingerprints, and I hear helicopters flying over the hills behind our house. Still, I don’t think we will get our stuff back. APJ, women’s intuition is widely underrated.  We Are Doomed, we were barely coming to know our neighbors when the burglary happened. They are as freaked as we are, and I hope everyone of us will be bit more careful going forward. Lime, Dubai wasn’t pleasant but it taught me valuable lessons.

Still it is beginning to be a home.

We have a car, but not yet a license to drive it on the seventh island. So, I took the bus to the third village north where they have a “supermarket” (cough… laugh… five short aisles stuffed to the ceiling). You learn to concentrate on the essentials  (that’s a good thing), if you have to take the public bus home, still four very heavy bags had to be hauled home.

Once through the door, I cooked Chinese winter melon soup and Jamie Oliver’s beef stew with guinness (yep, I watched TV last night). Both were a first and both are keepers for cold winter days. I love Chinese winter melon. It’s completely tasteless on its own, but in a soup it takes on the flavor of the rest of the ingredients.

I got the second last winter melon slice in the snow-white supermarket. My competitors were seasoned Cantonese grandmas… I had to grab quickly. I cooked it together with pork spareribs, sliced smoked ham, ginger, and wolfberries. The recipe also calls for red dates, but I didn’t want to buy them because of bad Dubai associations… ok, the truth is I wasn’t sure they were needed. Still the soup turned out yummy. I am a big fan of soups, especially if it’s cold and wet. One of the strength of German cuisine is its soups or “eintopf”. Like most of the best dishes around the world it’s poor men’s recipes, but oh so good. I can’t get all of the German ingredients here (does anyone have a cheap and reliable source of celeriac in Hong Kong?), so I am going for local recipes. Winter melon soup was yummy.

Jamie Oliver’s stew had to cook for two hours in the oven. The original recipe puts it into a pie with puff pastry. I am not that English, so I just made the stew and salt potatoes to go with it. It was very rich, smooth, and just what I needed today:

2 large sliced onions fried to gooey, sweet perfection

half a pound of marbled beef

3 cloves of diced garlic

stick of fresh rosemary, hacked to small pieces

1 stick of celery or two

a diced carrot or two

mushrooms ( I took local Chinese ones, not the tasteless, white Holland variety) and half a dozen dried ones (soaked in hot water for an hour)

pepper, salt

1 tablespoon of flour

a can of guinness (even the five-aisle supermarket had it ?!?)

water so that all ingredients are covered with liquid

at 180 degrees Celsius (360 Fahrenheit) for two hours in covered (oven-proof) pot

Jamie, you are the man!

I will also start a new sourdough production. Bread selection in Cinderella’s supermarket is pitiful, stuffed with preservatives, and I won’t buy it. Expect pics of burned sourdough bread in the future.

My neighbor has a wonderful starfruit tree.

And one was hanging over my fence.

Mmmm