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.

I had some errands to run in Central and took my camera along for the ride. The first part shows some of Central’s pedestrian walkways, which connect almost every building in the business district. Have you ever seen the futuristic drawing from the 1920’s in which a city is shown where cars drive on ground level and pedestrians walk on bridges? Unfortunately I have forgotten the painter’s name. In Central Hong Kong that’s pretty much a reality.

Below is a video of a lion dance I recorded yesterday. We watched it together with friends, and the atmosphere was fantastic. The little boy in the golden costume was the star of the performance, and there were lots of other kids, who wanted to touch, feed, and taunt the lions. Please excuse the low quality of the video. I used a camera not a camcorder, and youtube reduced the resolution even further.

We also watched the fireworks display above the Hong Kong harbor. A video will follow tomorrow… I promise :).