Single Girlfriend arrived at two. We began our weekend-long self-embalming process by seven, at Lan Kwai Fong, one of Hong Kong’s main nightspots.
What’s Lan Kwai Fong like, you may ask? It’s tiny, two streets long, ensuring that the same faces cycle through whichever bar you’re in, or in front of, with regularity. Its proportions also ensure that any stalking/avoidance manoeuvres are likely to be successful for the stalker and disastrous for the quarry (which may be why it’s also full of those in town only briefly).
Despite this photographic evidence, it is roughly an even man-to-woman ratio, but the women tended to be inside the bars, the men outside. Like a grown-up version of a school dance, the two sides stayed separate except for the brave souls that forayed into enemy territory. As one would expect when so much alcohol is vigorously mixed with so many people on holiday, bravery increased exponentially as the night unfolded.
It was a very friendly place. Within minutes of landing in the first bar, a woman had trodden on Single Girlfriend’s foot (admittedly, not an overtly friendly gesture) and faster than you can say ‘another round’, we were chatting with a very nice group of women, all long time residents here. Their dating stories singlehandedly rounded out at least two chapters, so thank you Julie and friends for your contributions.
Of course, given that Single Girlfriend is here precisely because she is single girlfriend, and my designated romantic proxy for the weekend, a certain amount of boy-hunting was had. Single Girlfriend took her task to heart, adding at least another two chapters to the book. Of course names will be changed to protect the innocent and the usual ‘this is fiction so you can’t sue us’ legalese added inside the front cover.
Have I mentioned the rain? It’s like movie-rain without the hair and makeup trucks to ensure dewy on-camera perfection after a downpour. So I spent a good part of the weekend with mad hair and squidgy damp feet in flip flops, hoping that cockroaches are as unhappy to breach the floods as I am. If one of those inch-long crunchy brown diseases on legs ever ran over my foot, my new address would be at The Priory, where nice ladies speaking in soft tones would medicate me hourly.
Despite the deluge I booked a table for Single Girlfriend and I at Hutong, on Kowloon-side, in the hopes that the fog and rain wouldn’t obscure what is surely one of the most spectacular views of the city.
We weren’t disappointed. In a miraculous made-for-TV-Jesus-docudrama moment, the skies cleared and the rain lifted just as we entered the restaurant, and we got our view. And our delish beef dish.
We also got some of the spiciest chilli crab on the planet. Real eye-watering, pain at the back of the throat stuff. I was thrilled.
After dinner, having taken the cause-as-cure approach to our up-till-now debilitating hangovers (the blame for which I place squarely at the feet of the very generous men in Lan Kwai Fong and our inability to count glasses of wine … as Single Girlfriend exclaimed between fistfuls of Advil “I was told there’d be no math on this vacation”), we returned to the scene of the crime for a medicinal glass of wine.
Here, on Saturday night, I observed, in their natural environment, the cultural phenomenon known as the Cougars. They do indeed exist, but unlike their mammalian namesakes, these hunt in packs. Everywhere it seemed were lined or Botox-frozen, heavily made-up faces atop bodies that knew their way around the inside of a gym (in such a high-stakes game as this, nobody was banking on being loved for their sparkly personality). The scene reminded me a bit of crocodiles gearing up for the Great Migration and, as is my reaction to those harrowing scenes, I was tempted to shout at the men whose beer goggles had got the better of them “Don’t drink at the watering hole!”
Sunday was a day of cultural enrichment, and detox. A few days ago I stumbled upon a street near my flat lined with tiny shopfront shrines. Incense wafts from the darkly mysterious interiors, where the shrine-watchers stoically watched me pass. Then yesterday an old woman sitting within smiled through her few remaining teeth and waved. I made the universal hand signal for ‘me-come-there?’ She returned with a ‘sure-thing-come-on-inside-and-have-a-look-around’ gesture. Or she was fanning herself in the heat.
In any event we went inside. Large coils of incense dangle from the ceiling, dropping their live ash on the floor, the shrines, our shoulders, every so often. One wall was lined with small ceramic figures, maybe incarnations of a god - as one might expect in a shrine up a back alley in Hong Kong where no one speaks English, no informational cards or headsets were available. The large shrine at the very back of the darkened room was fearsome, swathed in silk embroidered robes, with the daily offerings of oranges, paper burnt offerings and glutinous rice packets humbly perched at his feet. And on the other were wood block cuts of Chinese texts, maybe the story about who the gods are and why they’re so fierce (and like oranges).
It was a wonderful weekend, really something I’ll remember, and smile about, always. One might even say it was very nice, as the English are wont to do.
I’m contemplating Joy Ocean for the cruel-to-be-kind ministrations of the tiny Chinese sadist, though I’ll warn her to go easy on my liver meridian. Any more strain on that front and I’ll end up on the transplant list in a Chinese hospital.