My bud told me we were finally travelling again.  I got excited.  It’d been a while.

I even willingly went into the travel back pack — a tall ask —

Only to resurface in Hong Kong.

Wait a sec, I’d been here already.  This isn’t exciting!

The only saving grace is that I was staying at the Conrad hotel, where apparently they knew I was a VIB because they gave me a room on the top floor.  This, this I liked.  61st floor views are pretty sweet!

I chose to ignore the fact that the welcome back card wasn’t made out to me and that there was some mention about celebrating anniversaries.

What I liked a little less was that there were already other bears on premise.  First there was one Conrad bear.  Him I can handle.  I can show him his place.  But then more Conrad bears appeared.   There are 3 bears too many in this picture.

Luckily Nicholas said that these bears didn’t have to come along for the rest of the trip.  GOOD.

After we dropped off our stuff we stopped at the Collinson Crematorium to pay our respects to some ancestors.

Next, we went to mine and Nicholas’ least favourite kind of place.  A wholesale fish market.  It definitely smelled like fish.  A lot of fish.

Pokin had it in her head that we were going to take everyone to the Aberdeen Wholesale Fish Market, specifically to a canteen.  I cannot think of a place that more aptly fit the description of ‘hole in the wall.”  It really was a hole in the wall — I barely would have found the entrance if we weren’t given a photo of what to look for.  Apparently this place used to be a local’s secret, but it got written up in places like the Lonely Planet so it’s not so secret anymore.  Pokin met up with a person who knew a person, who had arranged to pick out some seafood for us that the restaurant then cooked.  I saw some conversation between Pokin and some person, I saw some money change hands, and then we proceeded to sit down through way too many courses of seafood.

I mean, who wants to eat stuff that looks like this?  Not I.  Not my bud.

I think the only thing that made the trip worth it at all was to see that our chef / cook was some shirtless guy who definitely did not look like he should be cooking our food.  It amused me.  And Nicholas.  Everyone else didn’t even pay attention as they were too busy eating a lot of seafood so the two of us amused ourselves.

Nicholas tells me we are going to Tokyo the next day.  Now this I’m excited about!