There are too many things I hate about France,

but Pierre Herme macarons can be a reason for me to be back.

Forget about macaroons in HK - 

the spelling has already told you that they are NOT authentically French!

Ispahan, Menthe Fraiche, Wasabi & Pamplemousse, Chocolat, Cassis...

God I miss them so much!! :9

*Important note: The macarons look plastique because they are miniatures.

>> TRIP TO MACAU (1.8.2008-3.8.2008)

Let me write a very hea entry on the trip to Macau... it doesn't deserve a long entry because it's the hea-est and tui-est trip in my life. We spent almost all our time indoors because
1) Macau is getting more and more like Las Vegas... I mean the weather. It's as hot as a desert and there's hardly any wind!
2) It was sooooooo sunny that one would likely develop skin cancer by staying in the sun for 5 minutes. I sincerely apologize for my invincible sunshine power.
3) The air in Macau was very polluted. It was sunny but the sky was hardly blue.
4) We are too old to dart from place to place for angry-eating... and actually we had tried most of the local eateries last year (i.e. when we were still young).
5) It's not convenient to get around now in Macau as the demand for taxis greatly exceeds its supply.

The answer to why we chose to visit Macau in spite of the above deterrent factors, is point number 6): our hotels were super nice and we got the rooms for FREE! (must emphasize this point to stop ppl from criticizing me for being rich, coz I am NOT! But I welcome criticisms if one day I get rich, haha) :D Must thank Eric's friend Anthony (who is THE rich one) for this! 

We stayed at Crown on the first night. I really don't want to say this because a certain person I despise is very fond of Crown - but Crown is truly the best hotel in Macau. It's posh in a subtle way, unlike the pompous Venetian which definitely targets the Mainland market.

Our room was a Deluxe Room.  The beds were large enough for all 4 of us - bear in mind that Kevin should be counted as 2 persons. :P

Every single room features the panoramic view of the Macau peninsula. The view is great at night but as you can see, Macau is really ugly in daytime.  

The amazingly extravagant circular bathtub! Again it's large enough to accomodate the 4 of us at the same time! But of course I enjoyed a bath in this luxurious tub on my own la. :) Reading magazine and drinking chilled fruit juice (a range of beverages in the mini bar were free) in a hot tub is just soooooo relaxing. Btw, the bath products were all from Elemis. :)

The indoor swimming pool (a must in Macau given the carcinogenic sunshine) gave me another reason to love the hotel. You know what, there's music playing under the water! :) The pool was all ours when we went swimming on Sat morning. If you visit the pool, don't forget to try out the shower and steam rooms in the changing room. ;) 

Ly, Kevin and I went to the bar on the top floor on Fri night, while Eric the professional gambler was working. The bar was quite decent and I particularly like the high ceiling. The only thing which displeased me was that we were clouded by dense Mainland tobacco smoke at the bar. The air of Macau is probably so polluted because there are too many Mainland smokers.  I think Macau should ban Mainland tobacco even if the government doesn't want to introduce a smoking ban.

Apart from the bar, the hotel lobby is also on the top (38th) floor. Pretty stylish huh? :) 

To complete the Crown experience, I had a spa treatment called Gold Indulgence at the hotel spa as well. It's good! When you leave the room you will find your body glowing because the treatment includes the application of a body lotion with gold dust. :) The treatment was also memorable to me because I became a super big 豪客 accidentally. Just don't ask why.

We stayed at MGM on the second night. It's another great hotel, but I like it much less than Crown coz it's a bit flashy.

The Grand Plaza in the heart of the hotel, reportedly modelled after the town squares of Portugal.

I love this decorative mirror in the lobby. :)

The decor of the hotel is certainly great but it lacks consistency. This futuristic corridor clearly does not match the grand decor in other parts of the hotel.

As a side note, the swimming pool of MGM is very gap too. It has the design of an infinity pool but it's very small. Right next to the pool is neither water nor trees, but a strip of deserted land. For this reason we didn't bother to swim in the pool.

But still, our room was great because it's a One Bedroom Deluxe Suite, which was about 2.5 times the size of our room in Crown! It's the first time I stayed in a suite. We had to get to our room from this VIP lift lobby. :)

The room has a large bedroom with a separate, spacious seating room. So even though the room was designed for 2 persons only, everyone got a place to sleep - the bed for Ly and me, and the sofa in the seating room for Kevin. What about Eric, you ask? As a professional gambler, he didn't sleep at all on Sat night lor. Crazy guy... 

The bathroom is absolutely my favourite!!! God, it's ENORMOUS! And almost all the bath products were from Molton Brown. :) You can watch TV while bathing in the whirlpool tub... we found it difficult to control the temperature of the tub water though. But the wonderful rain shower and body sprays in the shower room had certainly compensated for that! ;)

After this trip, we all wonder if we can accept staying in smaller rooms in Macau next time. We are spoiled, obviously. :P 

Due to writer block, EVILGIRLS' SAGA Chapter 2 is not yet up. Sigh... :(

I feel like crying because I am hopelessly aphasic.

浪漫九龍塘* by My Little Airport. Thanks Helen Ho for introducing this intriguing band to me. :) I am looking forward to tomorrow's concert!

And special thanks to Alan Tso for teaching me the meaning of 爆房* (just verbal explanation, of course!!). Or I would not be able to fully enjoy the lyrics of 浪漫九龍塘. :P

*Parental Guidance

I really can't believe it. These 2 weeks I have miraculously few reports to write! Maybe God does exist... and He wants to read my travelogue so much that he has incapacitated people from committing crimes. In view of God's will and the fact that my only legitimate excuse of not blogging has been eliminated,  I shall dutifully write about the trip to Iceland... even though today I am actually in the mood of boiling CSI DVDs. :P

I've always been attracted to Iceland because it's not popular with HK people. Sometimes I do feel disoriented in hot destinations like Tokyo and Bangkok, coz apparently there are more HK Chinese in the streets than in Stanley or Cyberport! :0 Going to these places is no longer cool because now even ah pig ah dog can write guidebooks as thick as bibles on the cities! As a result, in the last few years I have been paying more attention to offbeat destinations. Among these, Iceland is the most appealing because it's a Scandinavian country (= clean, modernized and beautiful), and it seems that less than 5% of the ppl in HK have been there before. Even my adventurous boss, who's been to almost every corner of the world, told me that she hadn't visited Iceland! Now THAT's what I call a cool destination! :)

Apart from its remote location and very high standard of living, the name of Iceland has probably deterred many HK people from visiting it as well. Relatives and friends have been asking me, "Is Iceland very cold?" or "Is there ice everywhere in Iceland?" The truth is, as you can see from the above picture of Reykjavik (capital of Iceland), Iceland is not completely covered in ice though there are indeed many glaciers and icecaps in the country. It was cold when we visited it last month, but not too cold by European standard - average temperature in April is about 1-5 degree Celsius. If you check the map, you will realize that Iceland is in fact at a lower latitude than many parts of Sweden, Finland and Norway. There's a popular myth about the name of Iceland. It's said that the Vikings who first settled in Iceland fell deeply in love with the country because of its plentiful natural resources; they then decided to name it "Iceland" in order to discourage other potential settlers from exploiting it. On the contrary, they named the vast territory next to Iceland "Greenland", in spite of the fact that it is covered by huge ice sheet and is barely green, because they wanted to fool their enemies into settling on the barren land. :j I really love this myth because it's so evil, so Viking! :P But after all a myth is a myth; according to historical records, a Norwegian called Floki gave Iceland its name when he sailed to the west coast of Iceland and saw icebergs floating in the fjord. History is always less entertaining... 

When I told the Evil Girls about the plan of visiting Iceland, they were thrilled by the idea too! Shan, who's doing a postgrad degree in London,  quickly volunteered to be my travel buddy. :) Then later Elaine, the eternal exemplar of SHM (= 死好命, NOT simple harmonic motion), told us that she could probably join us as well coz she would start her secondment in London in spring 2008!! :D :D :D Of course we had persuaded Tris to join us, but she insisted that she could not make it because of her tight placement schedule. :( Too bad... Tris should really learn to be more evil!! Anyway, after spending months poring over guidebooks and comparing prices of air tickets + hotels + tours, Shan and I finally flew to Iceland from London in the evening of 4 April! Elaine couldn't fly with us as she had to work that day, so she was to catch the afternoon flight on 5 April and meet us in Reykjavik. ;)

As we had planned to formally start sightseeing after Elaine's arrival, Shan and I were very hea in the morning of 5 April. :P We first went to the tourist office for enquiries, then walked leisurely along the coast of Reykjavik and take pictures of the docks. The weather was perfect and the sky was sooooooo blue! The lovely weather had put us into a very cheerful mood. :D

Then we slowly headed toward the city centre. The above picture shows the basalt building of Althingi, the parliament of Iceland. The parliament has a history that can be dated back to more than 1000 years ago, though it was orginally established in another part of the country. I was quite surprised by the small size of the parliament building, coz even the Legislative Council Building in HK is larger! :0

As Reykjavik is a rather compact city, most of the major attractions are within walking distance. It did not take long before we arrived at Tjornin, the placid lake in the city. The lake reminds me of the scenic lake in Zurich, though of course Tjornin is much smaller.  In fact, tjornin means "pond" in Icelandic. The white lakeside building is the City Hall.

Lovely houses along the shore of the lake... I really want to marry an Icelander and stay in Iceland. Seriously.

The shore of the lake was congested with ducks, swans and geese. When we got closer to the lake, we noticed that in fact about 1/4 of it was frozen. Many ducks were standing and walking on the ice. :)  

Shan and I took lots of pictures at the lake because we have never seen so many water birds in our past life. :P In particular, we spent much time trying to photograph the tufted ducks because they looked so gap! Yet we could not get a really good picture of them in the end as they kept diving into the water. You can see their pictures here though. ;)

The lake is nice enough for the eyes to see, but to the ears it's an entirely different matter. The birds were squawking and honking loudly like a bad chorus. There were unbearably noisy!

After taking tonnes of pictures among the "landmine fields" set up by the water birds, we went to the National Gallery of Iceland situated on the lakeside. It's very very mini by the standard of a national gallery. The art exhibits there had minimal descriptions in Icelandic, not to mention in English. There we came across the haunting works of an Icelandic artist named Gabriela Fridriksdottir, whom I've just found out to be Bjork's cousin. Though Shan and I are both fond of bin tai things and together we make the best horror movie buddies, we found the videos made by Gabriela utterly abhorrent... I still remember in the nightmarish video "Catharsis", a group of women (nuns?) covered a certain humanoid with grass, straws and mud, then wrapped it up in coarse fibres as if they are practising some sado-masochistic rituals, before they stitched the whole thing up and threw it away... :0 :0 :0 But I guess it's exactly this kind of dark art that makes Gabriela one of the brightest new stars of the local art scene. Shown above is a shot (photo courtesy: Mary Boone Gallery) captured from her video "Inside the Core", which is equally sickening.

Our next stop was the Kolaportid Flea Market, which is open only on Saturdays and Sundays. It is held in this industrial building close to the harbour. The huge artwork on the outer wall of the building is certainly impressive! :) Though due to some technical problems, this panorama looks kinda distorted... :(

The flea market resembles the Covent Garden Market in London; there are stalls selling second-hand clothes, CDs, toys etc. There is also a section selling a variety of Icelandic fish and seafood. Of all the fish delicacies, the hakarl (Greenland shark) cubes shown above is certainly the most interesting, though I actually doubt if it can be described as a kind of delicacies. Hakarl is Iceland's national food, but it's notorious for its repugnant smell and terrible taste. Due to its high uric acid content, the shark is edible only after it has been fermented for months, during which the acid is degraded into ammonia in a series of chemical reactions. Still, the end-product has the stench of ammonia that can rapidly induces nausea. Actually other national dishes are just as appetizing - like singed sheep's head (completed with eyes) sawn in two, rams' testicles pickled in whey and pressed into a cake, sheep's blood and suet sewn up in sheep's diaphragm... :0 It's a relief to know that nowadays Icelanders no longer eat these except at the Thorrablot winter feast. Maybe in the past food was so scarce in Iceland that the Icelanders had to eat whatever they had... or maybe the Icelanders were simply bin tai!! :P

To be frank, there was little to see in the market apart from the fish section. I was looking for anything worth photographing when I saw this Icelandic kid running around the gumball machines and curiously fiddling with them. I took a picture of him because I really like ghost babies and kids! :P

The kid realized that he was being photographed in no time, and he was so embarrassed...

... that he buried his face! Wahahaha... isn't he cute?? :D

>> TO BE CONTINUED! ;)