Day 199: Dazed and Confused in Hong Kong — Peak Tram — Recluse — Nobu
Today I did The Most Margaret Thing Ever. Ugh.
Those who know me well know that I can soooometimes be an absent-minded person.
This is awesome in some ways (totally unburdened by anxiety!), and so brutally annoying in others.
Take today.
I had signed up for a 9 am spin class across the Harbor in Central at a place called XYZ. At 8:15 I was walking out the hotel door with a fistful of HK$ bills — just a little more than enough to take the train (train doesn’t take credit cards).
Sidenote: The morning subway commute was packed, obviously. Like the 4/5 in New York. Had to let a few trains pass before I could ram myself into the sardine situation. Fun to see/experience the city’s weekday morning commute.
Anyway, got to the class on time and thoroughly enjoyed myself.
By 10 am I was in the locker room showering and preparing to enjoy a few hours of Margaret Time. Teddy was going to manage the kids at the breakfast buffet and do some school while I got glorious hours to myself. I couldn’t wait. Maybe a lovely little cafe somewhere? I hadn’t eaten yet today and after a tough workout, I was ready to chow down, have a coffee and relax! Had my Kindle and everything!!
But then I realized. I hadn’t packed a bra! I’d gotten showered, dressed, blow-dried …and didn’t have a bra! Ugh.
But — no problem. You know what? This is a city. I’ll just pop into this here Marks & Spencer and buy a cheap bra and continue about my morning. I’ve got coffee to drink and a Kindle to read! Nothing can get in my way!
I tried on a bra at the store and leaned out the fitting room door to ask the attendant: “Can I just wear this out?” She said yes, walked over with a pair of scissors and said: “But no exchanges or returns after I cut this tag off.” I said no prob.
I dressed and walked out to the register wearing my new bra — eager to get on with my precious free morning. Coffee! Kindle! Food!
The lady rang me up and I reached to pay.
But.
I. Had. No. Wallet.
NO WALLET.
I’d left it in the hotel room.
All I had were a few bills of cash — and because I was already wearing this stupid no-tags-on-it-anymore bra, I had to spend the last of my dough…on it.
I walked out of the shop into the steamy, insanely hot Hong Kong morning, far from the hotel, with no money for my highly anticipated “Margaret Time” breakfast. I didn’t even have enough for a coffee at Starbucks. And I couldn’t even have cabbed or subway’d back to the hotel. Uber’s not really a thing here and the cabs only take cash.
Teddy was just getting the kids breakfast and they were planning to do school time. I couldn’t ask them to disrupt all that just because of my stoopid mistake.
So.
I needed to wait until Teddy and the kids met up with me per our plan. I walked to our ultimate meeting point: The Peak Tram ticket station… and sat on a bench for two hours in the heat….waiting. Post-workout starving. No coffee. No food. No AC. For several hours.
Not surprisingly, I never really recovered from it. By the time we met up and got on with our day, I had such low blood sugar and was so dehydrated that I didn’t ever really bounce back. I was S-A-P sapped.
And had no one to blame but myself.
Obviously it was pure comedy and I saw it as such early on. As I told Teddy, you can’t be a space cadet AND hard on yourself — or else you’d never survive. Have to be able to laugh it off.
You can ask them about the rest of the day — it’s all a fog for me.
Just kidding. We met up and rode the Peak Tram up to…the peak.
We’ve been to so many cities this year that have a mountain view funicular/gondola situation — Bogota, Santiago, Rio, Cape Town, Valparaiso, Bergen, etc. — that we’ve kind of started saying no to doing them. Seen one city from up high, seen em all. But this was truly different.
And of course, where most cities have a few t-shirt shops and an ice cream stand at the top, Hong Kong had a full-on….mall. With a Madame Toussaud’s wax museum, Burger King and Bubba Gump Shrimp. I finally got some food in my system at that point — a Japanese seaweed bun from a convenience store.
We descended from the peak and took a cab out to Repulse Bay to see what the beach situation is here. This was recommended to us by a local ex-pat friend of a friend whom we haven’t met but who’s been super helpful via WhatsApp.
Had lunch on the beach at Limewood (kids eat free Mon-Wed!), then sat at a playground while the kids played and had fun with this giant marketing installation.
We cabbed it back to the hotel for a much-needed dip in the pool. I was still a parched zombie/shell of a human from my no-money morning.
For dinner we decided to spend the $200 credit we had for the hotel restaurants thanks to our travel agency this leg of the trip, Small World Travel (you’ll be hearing more about them and how we worked together to plan basically the entire second half of the year (what, you thought we conceptualized and booked this crazy itinerary all by ourselves????))
So we went to Nobu. I couldn’t stop thinking about our friends Michelle and Joe, who once saw kids at Nobu in Tribeca and wondered: “If you’re eating at Nobu as a kid…where do you go from here??”
Of course we only went because we had “free” money to burn there.
Still, though — such little punks who have no idea how good they have it. Willa gorged herself.
There were more charades. They’re getting better at it. Then bed.
