I had the day off, so we had to do somebloodything other than sit in the apartment and watch last year’s American TV on cable.

So, we went for a walk down Caine Street, to the end, where it runs into the Hong Kong Botanical and Zoological Gardens. And we looked around there a bit, and saw most of the lemurs and some of the monkeys and birds. The park/zoo/garden is built into the hill eventually crowned by Victoria Peak, so it’s a bit of an uphill sort of thing, as so many walks are here. But we got to see the avian crowd and exotic flora, and a statue of George VI (Elizabeth II’s father, yes?) and the lemurs fighting noisily, so it wasn’t a useful effort. And we saw the first functioning fountain we have encountered on the island, and that counts for something. Quite nice. I think we have a picture of it somewhere (click the link).

It was dusk, and we decided to indulge in the semi-official Central/Mid-Levels expat “social” thing … which is to find one of the dozens of bars along the “travelator” (more on that in a moment) and absorb a lot of alcohol and nibble on some indifferent food and watch the world go by. Or much of HK Island, anyway.

Can’t say we were disappointed.

We came out of the Botanical and Zoological Gardens at dusk. I wasn’t hungry, but we were already out, and what the heck, we decided to make our way back to the strip of expat eateries/drinkeries that line each side of the “travelator.” It’s not far.

OK, the travelator. I’ve made reference to this before. It is a series of escalators that begins on Queen’s Road, down by the Central subway station, and runs … oh, somewhere quite a bit up into the Mid-Levels neighborhood, the rather tony and more-Western neighborhood leading up to the summit of Victoria Peak. HK likes to say the “travelator” is the longest escalator in the world, which sounds nice, but it’s actually a series of about 6-10 escalators broken up by walks across level ground and even over some streets, so it’s kind of a bogus stat.

But this series of escalators is very handy. It’s very steep, in that area, see, and the escalator keeps the locals (and tourists) from keeling over while slogging up the 500-foot grade from Central to Mid-Levels. (Unless it’s after midnight, as noted in a previous post, when they shut down the travelator and it’s cab-or-walk.)
The escalator/travelator is laid out in a narrow ribbon between buildings and crosses over most roads as it heads uphill. And if you choose to just stand as it crawls along, you can scrutinize the scads of restaurants and bars and bar-restaurants and tapas haunts and hamburger joints and pizza places. Sometimes even read parts of their menus, if your eyes are sharp and they’ve written some of it out on a chalkboard. And if you come through late enough, as I do coming back from work, you see all these places packed with people. Mostly expats. Tossing back mixed drinks and guzzling beer or sipping wine. Just gobs of them.

So, first day off since we’ve been based in Mid-Levels, we went “native.” (Though expats are anything but native, in the cosmic HK sense.)

We ended up at a place called the Peak Bar & Cafe. It was 6 p.m., which is bloody early to be in a “cafe & bar” in HK, especially in Mid-Levels, so we had no trouble finding a small table at the edge of the cafe and settling in for several hours of sangria-sipping, mezza-nibbling and people-watching.

The Peak Bar & Cafe is on the south side of the strip … that is, the side where people are walking downhill. The most amusing bits of p[eople-watching were seeing well-dressed women trying to negotiate their way down the slope in high heels. It’s almost not doable, and I felt sorry for them. Not only was their ridiculous (if quite trendy) footwear no doubt causing them physical pain, they were at real risk of tripping, pitching forward and tumbling down the hill all the way to Central.

It’s interesting, how Euro the area around there feels, even though it’s long since become majority Chinese. But it absolutely does have a different vibe from anywhere else in HK we’ve been so far, even if the ratio of Westerners to Chinese is “only” about 1-to-3. In the bars and cafe, it’s overwhelmingly Western.

Oh, and this is telling: For the first time since we’ve been on the island, the menu we got was ONLY in English.

We ordered the white sangria. Actually, the whole point of the event, to me, was the sangria. I had fixed my mind on it earlier in the day because I like sangria and had seen it advertised at a place when I came home late last night. Yes, sangria! (Even though it nearly killed me, 16 years ago, in Spain, when three of us had four pitchers of it at a little restaurant in Barcelona, the day after the Olympics, the night before we flew back to the U.S, and I fell off a curb … and have I already told this story? If so, I apologize.)

Anyway, the white sangria had rum in it, and a lot of fruit. But I didn’t really notice it for a long time. We ordered some mezzas, which I believe is Arabic for “little dishes.” Basically, it was some triangle-shaped wedges of pizza-like cooked dough with five little bowls of dips — hummus, eggplant, a shredded cucumber thing, spicy roasted peppers and olives. (Leah was in charge of the olives and cucumbers.)

So we sat there and watched the astonishingly varied world of HK Mid-Levels go by, people from dozens of nations (just to listen to them speak), either on the travelator heading up the hill, or stumbling along the slope down the hill. Almost entirely adults, very few over the age of 50, and many of them fairly sleek and well-dressed.

As the night went along we became more amusing and insightful. Funny, how that works. The insight agent on this particular evening seemed to be the fruit in the sangria, which we suspect had been drowned and left to decompose for a day or three in rum.

Anyway, there were the weird old Euros in the corner of the bar, one with a Karl Marx beard, plotting proletarian revolution or maybe just getting good and drunk, which is something of a way of life here … and the two wide-eyed 60ish tourists who were at the table next to the weird old guys, and the three (Canadian?) girls who say next to us and complained about work and the two quasi-local expats who drank a lot, then pulled their chairs out into the sidewalk so they could smoke without technically being in the restaurant — at the risk of having a walker bump into them.

Did we actually come up with any interesting/worthwhile observations? Well, maybe this one: Hong Kong may be the only Asian megalopolis that has a real and tangible Western undertow to it. (Unless Singapore does, too, and we doubt it, given that you can be caned there for, like, spitting on the sidewalk.) HK may be the only place on the planet that is overwhelming Asian but where you can buy Guinness in nearly any brasserie and corn flakes in nearly any grocery and spout English at literally anyone and reasonably expect them to understand at least some of what you just said. Even while inebriated.

And this: If you are a Westerner and you want to go to the last place on earth where the echoes of “European colonial empire” are still in the air … this is the place. A place where Westerners are treated with a sort of wink and a nudge. “Sure they’re drunk and disorderly, but they’re Brits/Aussies/Kiwis/Canucks/Yanks and that’s what they do.”

We stayed at “The Peak” for a couple of hours, and as it approached 8 the place filled up. As they all do, on both sides of the travelator, as the night gets older. Eventually, we took the moving walkway up to Caine Road, and found our way “home,” and thought about what a splendid little place Hong Kong can be, especially if you have a few dollars in your pocket and a nice, clean place to stay. Oh, and a pitcher of white sangria — with rum, apples and lychee fruit — in your recent history.