Walled city, spiral, orchestra

There was a review on the Web about a Thai restaurant in Kowloon City so I decided to make a trip out there and check out the Walled City later. I took a minibus on my own this time, armed with a route number and a street map 13 years out of date (it still showed the old airport nearby). Passengers were telling the driver where to let them off, but I didn't know how to say the street in Cantonese (those six tones can make a world of difference). Fortunately, someone called out a street I could recognize and I got off near Lung Kong Road which is where Golden Orchid Thai Restaurant is.

The menu had a note saying they don't re-use coconut or pineapple shells for serving their dishes. Seeing that implies that there are some restaurants that do recycle their leftovers. I ordered a dish written on the blackboard, roast duck red curry with rambutan and pineapple. Not bad, but not worth the trip out here. Beer's cheap though, a bottle of Singha only cost me $15HKD. When I was snapping a photo of the restaurant's interior, I had the camera turned to face me and I had to take several shots because my arm kept getting in the way. After a while, a man tapped me on the shoulder and asked whether I had a particular interest in him because I seemed to be pointing the camera in his direction. I explained I was just photographing the dining area and would gladly erase the picture if he wanted. He grunted and went back to his family.

Over at the Kowloon Walled City Park, I was pleasantly surprised by the peaceful and beautifully landscaped surroundings. There weren't many people there, mostly old men sitting around having a smoke and chatting with each other. Highly recommended, and do read the story behind its existence.

I walked to Lok Fu station and then took the subway to Langham Place, a mall in Mong Kok. Two things I was looking for: a chocolate buffet at the Langham hotel restaurant and Muji, which I read about from a post from kottke. The mall has an annoying thematic feature: a superlong escalator takes you from something like Level 7 to Level 11 and you have to walk down a set of spiral steps to get to the intervening floors. BWG discusses it here.

At The Place, I sat down for what I thought was an afternoon dessert buffet. But after two plates of chocolate sweets, I realized the entire restaurant was available to me. Unfortunately, I wasn't very hungry, so I wasn't able to eat very much of the congee (made to order), dim sum, salads and desserts. This would be a great place to go with a group of people, it's bright and spacious and buffets offer something for everyone. It's only available from 15:15 to 17:30 though.

Over at Muji, I wasn't very impressed by what I saw. It seemed like a mix of Umbra and IKEA, lots of translucent plastic storage solutions. Or maybe Caban. Then I saw the off-white clothes (no labels!), bath and beauty products, pens and pencils, snacks and freeze-dried food. What kind of store is this!? I'll have to check out their flagships in Tokyo.

In the evening, I went to the Hong Kong Cultural Centre for a Tchaikovsky concert. There was a sign at the box office saying that the show would go on: it turns out that this was their last concert of the season and as luck would have it, the air conditioning was broken and had only been fixed earlier in the day. It was so warm they needed fans on the stage and the musicians used clothespins to keep their music on the stands. The hall is really ugly: forest green seats and wood throughout. Musically, the orchestra sounded fine, with a very powerful brass section (but maybe that's because I was seated in the balcony above them).