Busy, nonwork weekend — Sino Francisco

It’s only three days before the bulk of the [alive not dead] team fly off to Hawaii for a week. I’m not completely sure whether or not we’ll have frequent access to the internet – perhaps it’d be good to unplug for some time after so many consecutive months of constantly being online 12+ hours a day.

This weekend I had a really interesting, really contrasting Saturday and Sunday.

Saturday:
As the weather has gotten cooler, I’ve switched from hitting the beach most every weekend to what I hope to be my “Fall-Winter” activity – hiking. I’d like to think myself as a pretty outdoorsy kind of guy and I’m trying to keep to my friend’s recommendation of getting off of Hong Kong Island at least once a week and doing something more natural. Thanks to Michael for inviting me to a hike – unfortunately, the hike turned out to be even more strenuous than what I was ready for. Ivy and Boon “wimped out” beforehand – but now I think they probably made the right choice because I was only able to complete parts 1 and 2 of a 3-part hike on Lantau Island that went from Discovery Bay overhill to Mui Wo, Mui Wo=>Nam Shan=>Pak Kung Au, and then from Pak Kung Au=>Ngong Ping. Parts 2 and 3 basically entail climbing Hong Kong’s 2nd and 3rd tallest mountains…. It took me about five hours to complete the first two parts so I was unable to complete the Pak Kung Au=>Ngong Ping with the rest of the group and fled away on a bus to have a leisurely coffee at Pacific Coffee in Tung Chong with Bob and Eva… haha … not so outdoorsy after all! Oh well, this gives me motivation and a goal to surmount before summer hits next year. New goal: Climb up to see the Big Buddha before summer time…

Photos courtesy of Michael:

With Michael at the top of Nam Shan

Man I’m dark!

Along the mountain ridge on Nam Shan

I like reading about historcal tidbits before doing a hike and recalling from my college Chinese history class that the area where I was hiking was the final retreat point for the Song Dynasty imperial court before it was defeated by the Yuan (i.e. Mongol) dynasty. The Song Dynasty (actually, one of the more boring, non-snazzy dynasties as compared to the wealthier and more flashy T’ang and Ming dynasties) is largely responsible for the current dialect of Chinese that is now Minnanyu/Taiwanese/Hokkien when the imperial court retreated southwards into Fujian and eventually Guangdong. As a consequence, the Taiwanese dialect is actually still supposedly remarkably similar to the ancient original Han dialect of the original Chinese imperial court – in case you don’t already know, Mandarin Chinese was actually itself a foreign import from non-Han Chinese and much of the other Asian languages including Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese have more imported into their languages from the older “Middle dynasties” Chinese rather than from Mandarin Chinese. Thanks Wikipedia! And, Ranch, you can correct me if I’m getting my linguistics wrong. I learn more everyday!

Okay… that was a bit of a tangent…

Sunday:
I was so dead-tired from hiking that I decided to do a relaxing Sunday and dedicate it to sitting in a cafe and drinking coffee. Off of suggestions from not one but TWO members on [alive not dead], I decided to check out After School Cafe in Causeway Bay with my friend Shan to eat lunch and do some pleasure reading/studying. Unfortunately, it was closed when we got there (apparently, it’s switched to private reservations only!) so I decided to take Shan to a cafe that a small, cool cafe, Mary Jane Cafe that I had visited the month before. THAT cafe was closed, so we went to the cafe nextdoor, Cafe On Board which was really a treat. Great decoration, free wireless (!) and a comfortable atmosphere. We had lunch Cafe On Board and then had coffee and did pleasure reading for a couple of hours at Mary Jane Cafe. What a great way to relax in the afternoon – I really have to explore more coffee shops around Causeway Bay.

Photo of Mary Jane Cafe in Causeway Bay courtesy of Etchy

After all of this cafe-hopping and ingestion of lots of caffeine, Shan wanted to find a maid cafe in Causeway Bay and found one newly opened by surfing online – in fact, it was just a BLOCK away from where we were relaxing at Mary Jane Cafe. In case you don’t know what a maid cafe is, you can check the Wikipedia entry:

(コスプレ系飲食店, Kosupure keiinshokuten^?), are theme restaurants and pubs that originated in Akihabara, Tokyo, Japan around the year 2000. They include maid cafés (メイドカフェ, Meido kafue^?) and butler cafés (執事喫茶, shitsuji kissa^?), where the service staff dress as elegant maids, or as butlers. Such restaurants and cafés have quickly become a staple of Japanese otaku culture. Compared with service at normal cafés, the service at cosplay cafés involves the creation of a rather different atmosphere. The staff treat the customers as masters and mistresses in a private home rather than merely as café customers. The popularity of the Cosplay restaurants and maid cafes has spread to other regions in Japan, such as Osaka’s Den Den Town as well as other countries, such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Canada.

We quickly called our friend Phil and all converged on the maid cafe and sure enough, it was on the second floor in a great location overlooking Times Square. Unlike the maid cafes that I’ve heard of, there wasn’t really a collection of manga to browse and, while you could play the Nintendo Wii there, you couldn’t play the Wii with the maids (to Phil’s disappointment). On the other hand, true to Japan, they do call you ‘主人’ when you enter the door.

“Chee-su” with our maid server… Shan got a big kick out of the whole thing and possibly wants to open up a maid cafe now… Phil was slightly perturbed by the extreme politeness…

I’m not sure if I’m going to go back to this particular maid cafe, but I’m glad that I satisfied my curiousity and found one in Hong Kong.

Mountains and maids… what a weird weekend…