Remember the nice photos I posted of my newly setup veggie bed?
Well, the arugula has been eaten by a dozen caterpillars a few months ago. They looked beautiful, grass green with bright yellow stripes on their back. When I discovered them it was much too late. A woman from the local gardening society told me that they would turn into beautiful butterflies. Little bastards!
They also ate the Kailan (Chinese greens). The Japanese cucumber and string beans climbed up the bamboo sticks and look pretty, but there is not a single pickle nor bean in sight.
The surprising winners are the cocktail tomatoes and carrots from seeds I bought in Germany. Thirty juicy and sweet tomatoes and a dozen small but very orange carrots. I also put supermarket ginger into the ground and it sprouted. However the lemon grass, which was such a success in Dubai, withered and died.
I knew it would happen. Gardening is about learning and sticking with the winners. It takes time and experience. Next year my compost will be ready and I will dig it into the very clayie veggie bed. Every morning I will search for caterpillars. I will construct a raised bed, because tropical downpours will turn level veggie beds into ponds (with tiny cute frogs). And I will plant German carrots and tomatoes and maybe have a second go at Japanese cucumbers.
While the caterpillars munch the rest of my veggies, I watch a BBC series Around the world in 80 gardens. It’s enlightening. Gardening is like religion, so different around the world, but the concept is the same, we all like it and it makes us happy, in a weird BDSM kind of way.
I have been fifteen years in Hong Kong, but having this little garden around the house has been such a pleasure and new discovery. The veggie garden is a work in progress, but the rest, the so-called weeds, the plants that just sprout up after each rain, they are so pretty. The ones I like, I transplant to prime spots where they will strive and grow.
Whereas gardening in Dubai was about watering thrice a day, gardening in Hong Kong is about cutting down plants you don’t like at least once a month. I feel like Tarzan in a jungle with a machete… ok, huge -made in Germany- garden scissors. I also spray myself with “Deep Woods” mosquito repellent. It lasts for about 15 minutes until a colony of these little devils break out in laughter and descent on me.
And then they are the palm-sized spiders, and the creepy crawlies in the compost pile, and at least three geckos inside the house. I was raised by a mum who threw the spiders from the ceilings under our bath tub to eat the silver fish. Nature is about balance, and we are a part of it.
Little man and I observed our bedroom gecko tonight. George the Slow climbed up the wall, ambled past the curtains, and then stumbled behind the TV. The insect population in our bedroom will be kept at a minimum, my task in the equilibrium will be to wipe the gecko shit away.
Tomorrow little man and I will leave for Berlin where we will take care of my Dad’s garden. He is in hospital and half of his right foot is amputated, but in spite of this, and because of this, his tiny allotment garden is Eden and I will help my mum to take care of it. I am so ready for the pleasure of a temperate garden in summer. A bit of grass cutting and watering, how hard can it be?
I was waiting for little man at the school bus stop. A little Dutch girl who was waiting for her brother together with her mum said “I don’t understand why Chinese eat dogs”. Another daddy (Australian, with Fido on the leash) said “At some point in time people had very little to eat, so I guess they started to eat dogs”. Little girl: “I still don’t understand. These poor little dogs. Just imagine. It’s as if they were eaten by GIANTS!”. Mum of little girl: “Lots of people around the world eat unusual foods. For example Germans eat horses” and looks at me with challenging eyes.
Lol… ok this was a new one for me. I usually have to deal with liverwurst and Hitler. How to respond? Yes, there is horse meat available in Germany, though you have to look for it really hard, and most Germans alive today have not eaten it, me included. But then I thought, what’s the difference between a cow, pig, chicken, dog, frog, monkey, or horse? It’s only in our minds and cultural upbringings. Many Chinese don’t eat beef, because they view cattle as loyal helpers that plow rice fields. It is very unlikely that I will ever eat horse sausages, dog drumsticks, or monkey brains, but I will not look down on people choose to do so, because I eat bacon, steak, and chicken breast, and like them. And liverwurst.
Me: “ Yeah, Germans are not the only ones. The French eat it too.” (Lame, I know.)
Little girl: Yeah (turns to her mummy). Do you remember? When we were in France, the people also ate snails… escargots.
Dutch mummy: Yes, with parsley butter.
Me: Have you tried snake?
Dutch mummy: No I haven’t. Is it any good?
Daddy from Alaska (“We don’t like Sarah Palin!”) stares at all of us opened mouthed.
Me: Tastes similar to chicken, almost the same like frog legs. I had it in a soup.
Little girl: The good thing about having a dad who is a pilot is that he brings you many different things from around the world. Clothes, toys, food.
Dutch mummy: Yeah (looks pained because she and daddy are in a nasty divorce)
Little girl: Do you remember when he brought emu and kangaroo meat from Australia?
(Australian dad smirks)
Me: Have you had Impala?
Dutch mummy: No
Little girl: What’s Impala?
Me: A gazelle, really tasty.
Gazelle eater. Dutch cheese lover. Sarah Palin… only well done.
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.
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.
It’s strange. I feel infinitely more secure here than I felt in Dubai. We moved in our house about a week ago. I love the house. It’s surrounded by jungle on two sides, the neighbors are nice, it’s comfortable but not pretentious.
I am sure we made a ruckus when we moved in. Hundreds of boxes, lots of men hoisting stuff up to the second floor. Everyone noticed that we arrived.
A few days ago, I hung laundry on the roof top terrace (sweeping views of the mountains and the sea). I looked at the banana trees of my neighbor at the hill behind my house. They looked beautiful. I heard a noise. I looked more intently. There were two men among the banana trees. One looked me straight into the eyes.
He was surprised and afraid. Then he and his mate hurried off, up the hill.
“What was that about?” I thought. Why are they hurrying off? Were they stealing bananas? Yeah. Ok. They were stealing bananas.
There were other strange little signs: a reclining chair in a different place on the terrace, strange marks in the wet ground in the garden.
Then yesterday in the morning I came downstairs. I was greeted by “We have been robbed!” Now all the little strange signs made sense.
They came in through the sliding door on the first floor balcony (easy to open), went downstairs, took two laptops, mobile phones, wallets, and a few backpacks to carry the loot away. Then they exited through the kitchen window. Ten days after we moved in. Welcome!
They had observed us for a few days, found the easiest way in, made a quick sweep while we were snoring loudly.
None of the loot was strictly mine. It belonged to little man (laptop and school backpack) and his father (laptop, mobile phones, wallets, backpack). Which makes me think. I am more paranoid. I had a strange feeling. I am more careful. My stuff was not lying around.
I had, and still have, a very good feeling about the house, despite the fact that burglars went into our house in the wee hours and robbed us while we were asleep.
But I also had a feeling of paranoia, a feeling of being observed since we moved in. Call it female intuition. So my laptop and my mobile phone were beside my bed, not downstairs, and my wallet was in a drawer, not lying open on the dining table. It was just a feeling, nothing concrete.
We called the police. Neighbors asked what was going on, and we learned that it is fairly common. Gangs of men come by boat from Mainland China to Hong Kong. They set up tent camps in the nature reserves and spy on houses in the more rural, out of the way areas of Hong Kong. We were easy picking. Just moved in, inexperienced, no curtains yet, sliding doors not yet secured. The economy is bad, Chinese New Year is coming up (gifts to give), thresholds are low.
Now we know that our neighbors have been robbed too (some of them several times).
The result is an arms race. How can we secure our houses? Neighbor up the hill has turned his house into Fort Knox. More locks, a security system, cameras.
I wish we could leave the doors open. I wish people would respect our belongings. The loss of money is bad, but worse is the loss of privacy and the hassle. Some people draw their curtains very tight. I wish I could leave the terrace door and curtains open and not worry.
In Dubai no one robbed our house, but much worse things happened. It’s the story of little man’s father, who had terrible experiences in his workplace. I am only the third party witness, but I think he could turn his experience into a John Grisham book… and it would become a bestseller.
Here in Hong Kong we called the police. We had no hesitation about calling the police. They came and asked us what had happened. They looked for and found fingerprints. We were the victims and had absolutely no fear to be turned into the culprits. In Dubai, after all what happened there, we would have carefully thought about the pro and cons of calling the police. I think we would have decided against it.
I feel infinitely more secure here, and that feeling of security makes me feel at home. I know who to turn to. Calling 999 means help.
The year in Dubai was not a positive experience, but it taught me what to be thankful of. Hong Kong is a much better place.
Once upon a time a grown-up (definitely not a young innocent maiden) returned to the land of the seven dragons at the tip of China at the beautiful South China Sea ( although I would not swim in it).
She found a house she fell in love in on first sight. First sight involves feelings, gut feelings. It was surrounded by lush, green hills and had a beautiful view. A rental contract was signed despite a few shortcomings of the house. Then, when the landlord was due to sign the contract, he claimed that he had received a better offer. Alarms bells rang inside cinderella’s head. She wondered if she should bite into the apple. She did, because the alternatives were not as nice. They didn’t have a garden, they didn’t have a view. Although she knew that the landlord was an evil knight, a contract was signed.
Today, cinderella had a third look. THE MASTER BATHROOM HAS NO DOOR. Honestly, I didn’t notice during the first two visits. Because in my mind it was not something I thought was important to pay attention to. I was counting on it. But today I had to pee urgently and when I wanted to close the door there was none. WTF?
It’s the only bathroom on that floor. It has a bathtub, it has a beautiful shower, two wash basins, and a loo. It does not have a door. Am I getting old? Am I too conservative?
I have invited my parents to visit. My Dad can’t walk a lot, so the bathroom on the floor where he sleeps should have a door. Although my Dad is pretty cool about such things, if need be he pees against a tree, my Mum on the other hand…
The neighbors seems nice, the view is stunning, it’s located a bit out of the way… over the seven hills… I hope no seven dwarfs will knock on my door asking to have a pee.
Thank you all for your kind Christmas messages. We arrived in Hong Kong a couple of days ago after being stuck in a snow storm in Beijing for more than six hours, where we transferred. We were the lucky ones, others had to camp in the transit lounge for several days. Apparently, it was the heaviest snow fall in Beijing in 60 years.
I am busy house hunting, but yesterday I squeezed in a visit to M. at the quarantine facility.
His “jail” cell is very nice, but of Hong Kong proportions: a small glass closet with shelving and several boxes to cozy up in along the walls. The employees are very nice, and M. seems to be ok, just a bit bored.
