Tuesday, 6 November 2007

Attachment selling, Hong Kong style

You'd think that, given our background, we'd be used to attachment selling by now.  But I don't think either of us expected it in the hotel.  I was more concerned that something catastrophic was going to happen - no record of our reservation, credit card declined, room on fire - you know, the usual stuff that I come on here to blog about.  But the receptionist was concerned with giving us a "one chance only" opportunity to upgrade our room to "deluxe room on club floor, room is minimum of twice the size of your existing room" (it sounds funny in a Chinese accent).  After we declined this, then she started on the "special offer, today only" if we pre-booked breakfast for the duration of the stay.

Anyway, the non-upgraded room turns out to be just fine and is probably bigger than our flat anyway.  (We're working on making the room as untidy as the flat but, unlike the flat, I reckon that they'll clean this room daily).  We both still felt OK, tiredness-wise - the local time was 8pm, in the UK it would have been 12pm and we'd been travelling since Monday evening).  So we went out, watched the light show over the harbour (like fireworks without the banging) and found somewhere to eat.

Half-way through dinner, Vicky suggested taking a photo of the food: here it is, just for you, our half-eaten Chinese dinner:

06112007758

Our favourite here is the fried rice with pork - true genius food; not quite as good as Tang's Chinese buffet in Rickmansworth but, let's face it, what is?  (NB - I can confirm that the restaurant was not £5 all-you-can eat).

After, we came back to the hotel and at 11pm, it seemed to be the perfect time to sleep and get onto local time.  I knew that the jet-lag and disturbed sleep patterns would kick-in eventually and it did - at 4am, when both of us were wide awake and unable to sleep any more.  No doubt that will be back to bite us later.

Before coming back to the hotel, I went to the shop to buy some water and was surprised to see that Dave's been moonlighting with a shoe & hand-bag shop here in Hong Kong.  Fair play to you, Dave.

06112007760

No comments: