Since arriving here almost all our free time has been given over to the vexing problem of housing. Where to live, for four months. What can be afforded? Just how many utterly wretched $1,500-to-$1,800-a-month, already furnished, two-bedroom, short-term-lease apartments are there, on this island?

We might have thought maybe 50, or a hundred. Instead it turns out to be thousands. Almost all of them uninhabitable, as we found them, to my way of thinking. But you have to look at them before you find the one that isn’t awful — stumble onto it, really — and that takes time.

So we had done very little of the touristy things. The bits you do when you pull into town on a cruise ship or flee Singapore for a week to be someplace where you can spit without being arrested. Or wherever you’re from, and have a little disposable income.

We addressed that imbalance today. In part because our housing situation is close to being resolved, albeit in an amazingly convoluted way. In part because we both had the evening off and we wanted to make it semi-memorable.

Before I left, my mother tolusme, more than once, “Go to the Peninsula Hotel for High Tea.”

My parents did that, 20-or-so years ago. They were on a very nice cruise, with some in-laws, and when the ship parked in the strait between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, some of them went to High Tea at the Peninsula Hotel, on the Kowloon side of the water.

Now, the Peninsula is very nice. Very old-school, veddy British in its origins. Built in 1928, when the Empire was in decline but not everyone quite yet knew it. The Peninsula was considered imposing from the day it opened. It served, naturally, as the command post for the occupying Japanese army during World War II. In fact, the British and Commonwealth forces surrendered the colony (for what would be nearly four quite unpleasant years of occupation) on the third floor of the Peninsula on Christmas Day, 1941.

It is a five-star hotel, still, and has the chops to prove it. Right down to a couple of Rolls-Royces parked out front that may be rented for the day, I believe. If your pockets are deep enough (and you are brave enough to drive one of those hand-crafted beasts around the narrow and scary streets on Kowloon Side).

But we weren’t there for the Rolls. We were there for High Tea. Or Afternoon Tea, as the Peninsula prefers to call it. In the hotel’s enormous and elaborate old lobby.

(And to get a look at the place, here is a link to the hotel. Click on “occasions” near the top, select “venues” from the drop-down menu, click the arrow on the right side of the next page to get it to roll over to the lobby … and you can see what it looks like … and enlarge it, if you will.) Also, if you check my blogroll to the left of this post, you can see photos that we took there, and elsewhere, at the Adventures in Hong Kong — photos site.

My mother loves High Tea. I think High Tea it is a particularly English-speaking female thing. Everything just so. The ornate china, the wait staff in white gloves and starched uniforms. The good silverware, and the scones and clotted cream and what-all the Brits put out when they are doing these things to a turn.

We had to wait a bit, when we arrived. I suppose that makes the anticipation a bit keener. About 10 people waiting, in about four groups. But we didn’t mind. We were admiring the room and listening to a string/piano trio playing a mind-stretching set of pop music. From the Beatles’ “She Loves You” to “Night at the Opera” by Queen to “I Love You Baby” by Jersey boy Frankie Valli.

And, mind, the lobby is ringed on three sides by uppermost-end shops. The names of these folks slip through my mind, which is a sieve when it comes to shops, but pick a name among high-end retailers (Bulgari was one; Louis Vuitton was another) and they were all there, with baubles (so enormous they would make a pimp feel gaudy) in the windows and thick-necked “doormen” ready to help you wrestle your way into their emporia. But I digress.

We were seated, and given ornate menu placards. And we ordered the “standard” High Tea for two.

First came the table settings. Place mats. A knife and fork (the first fork anyone has given me in this chopstick city). A small plate. A very starchy napkin.

We had jasmine tea, rather than English, because the latter can be a bit bitter.

After perhaps 10 minutes (during which the couple from England, next to us, had us take pictures of them, then offered to take pictures of us) … the food arrived. Let me see if I can recall it.

It was on three plates, arranged inside a sort of tower.

On the bottom tier were three scones. Heavy biscuits with raisins. I don’t mind scones, but I really do need some strawberry jam or clotted cream (whipped butter without the salt, more or less) to lubricate them. Or I might choke.

On the second (middle) plate, were finger sandwiches — cucumber, smoked salmon, ham-and-egg salad — as well as a tiny quiche, and a puff pastry with India-style potatoes inside. I think that was most of it.

The top plate held the particularly sweet stuff. A variety of hand-made chocolates (a truffle, perhaps a petit-four, about a half-dozen of them in all), as well as ladyfingers with toasted pistachios and two small squares of pound cake.

It actually was quite a bit of food, and not the sort of thing you have at 5 p.m. in the States. Or even in Hong Kong — unless you’re in one of its surviving British Colonial bastions.

Consuming all that, along with quite a lot of tea that went cold (the service was perfunctory, at best) … took quite some time. But we were in no rush.

Actually, we decided to stretch the outing a bit more, and after looking around the next floor of the Peninsula … opted to go over to the InterContinental Hotel, another five-star establishment, just a few hundred yards away. We walked most of the way through air-conditioned tunnels and high-end malls, which was advantageous, because I had on a sport coat that wasn’t made for the ongoing heat wave here.

The InterContinental doesn’t have the cachet of the Peninsula, but it’s right on the water and has a spectacular view of Hong Kong Island from the sprawling lobby-level bar, and that is where we parked ourselves. The cheapest champagne, Moet, went for about $35 a glass (talkin’ U.S. dollars here), and the least expensive bottle of wine on a rather lengthy list went for $200 … so we each settled for a glass of wine each. (Alcohol of any sort is expensive here.) An Australian shiraz for me, a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc for Leah. Both were quite nice. Each was shown to us by a sommelier, in the already-opened bottles, and we were allowed to taste them before they were poured.

By now, night had fallen, and we just stared out the enormous picture window and at the masses of skyscrapers at Hong Kong Island, barely a mile away across the strait. Looking at the commercial logos, or the names of the buildings, and watching the lights take hold on a clear night. Here is what it looked like (taken from the hotel’s Web site.) Click on it and it gets slightly bigger.

We nursed those two glasses, with the aid of some enormous and very good olives (I hear; I don’t eat whole olives; ick) and some smoked mixed nuts, and listened to a four-piece jazz combo for 90 minutes, because we were waiting for a show.

At 8 p.m., the city’s daily light show went off, as scheduled. It isn’t dazzling, which we had been warned of, but it is interesting, and it brings out the tourists. We could see hundreds of people who didn’t feel like paying InterContinental prices for alcohol lined along the Kowloon Side promenade to watch it.

It begins slowly, with random flashes of laser-lighting from this or that building. White, red, green. And lights flashing up and down the sides of some other skyscrapers. Perhaps a dozen buildings are part of this, on the HK side. (We couldn’t see the Kowloon Side, of course, since it was to our sides or even behind us.) At the end, everybody fires off their lights at the same time. It isn’t quite the Fourth of July, but you need to see it once.

The whole time, at both hotels, we had a sense of being in a place of great opulence. Clean, a bit exotic, doting (well they were five-star hotels), and also very Western, in clientele — but also very disconnected from the lives of people who live here in tightly packed workaday neighborhoods like Wan Chai, from where I am typing this. You wonder who actually can afford to stay in places like that. Businessmen with lavish expense accounts. Drug lords, maybe? Russian kleptocrats? Old Money Brits? Who were those people? Perhaps I should have asked.

Anyway. The two hotels, the light show … were something we needed to do. Like Maxim’s, the dim sum palace, a week ago. If you are in Hong Kong, you go to these places. It’s the law. And, actually, we’re glad we went. My mother was right, about the Peninsula’s High Tea, in particular. And we paid for it with money she had given us as a gift.

Next up? Victoria Peak. or maybe Mid-Levels. At some point, maybe even Hong Kong Disneyland.