First few days of shows!

One thing that surprised us most about Hong Kong was the amount of english that is spoken--when moving to Montréal everyone said "oh you'll be fine, everyone speaks english"... but that of course is a bit of an exaggeration, since french is certainly the default language. So we were naturally a bit skeptical to belive that we would have such an easy time with the language barrier in Hong Kong. But, they were right! Everyone is very kind, helpful and undetstanding! The streets are CROWDED! There are so many people, so many stands, so much to look at, it is incredible! (Though of course, if we were able to escape the mall area and go to the smaller streets, we're sure we'd find less english).

After our first post, we walked around the city a bit for the morning, we went to Soho (hip restaurant area) and traveled up the escalator that leads you through all of the center of Hong Kong.  Yep, there is a huge escalator that pedestrians (which there are a TON of!) go up and down the hill--and apparently it changes direction in the morning.  We still have to find out what happens to everyone on the escalator when it changes direction.  We immediately found the nearest Starbucks, and also managed to find an awesome earthy-crunchy-veggie restaurant/café (where we had dinner that night), along with many other delicious looking restaurants--there is every kind of food here!

Later that evening (at 7:30) we had our first (and last) set of rehearsals. Waylon picked us up at the hotel with a woman named Emily, she is very sweet, young and chic. The ride to the IFC was about 15 minutes long, a perfect distance-- when we arrived they took us to the set and our dressing rooms. Emily and Waylon brought us to the mall about a half hour before the rehearsal started in order to help us get a bit settled and find our way around. When the dancers arrived (6 of them, and one santa claus) we had already run our act once in order to show the client (well, we think we ran the act for the client, we're not exactly sure who he/she is but have an idea..) --as they rehearsed we had about an hour to get into makeup and rest a bit.

To keep things short, our dress rehearsal didn't go too well, we ended up staying at the mall until 2 am-- not fun when jet lagged.  

The past few days of shows (this is now our third day) have followed a similar schedule-- leave the hotel at 10:10, chill quickly at Starbucks at the mall before getting into makeup (we're getting better at it!)... our shows are at 12:45 and 6:30.  Inbetween shows, we've so far only explored the mall, but we've started to make a list of mini-adventures we want to do once we get a bit more used to the schedule (and the weather gets nice again!).  The mall is HUGE (though not compared to the underground mall of Montréal of course) and full of high end stores and amazing restaurants (ranging from nice and cheap to ridicously expensive and gourmet).  We bought sushi from the awesome grocery store here one night for dinner, and met up with Tarra, one of Mimi's friends, last night for our first traditional chinese noodle and dumpling dinner!  And saw the most incredible city view of Hong Kong from her apartment on the 31st floor--it was like an iMax movie.  Tonight we're heading back to her apartment for homecooked salmon :)

Just a few funny things from the past few days....

- When they sing Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, they end with "like Shakespeare!" instead of "like George Washington!"... just a reminder that George Washington isn't a very well known guy here :P

- One of the dancer's names is Slinkie.

-The toy soldiers' dance makes us just a little bit happier each day.

-The fish isle of the grocery store sells more whole fish than fish fillets. and GINORMOUS crabs instead of lobsters.

-There are incredible chocolate cakes everywhere.  Its dangerous.

-They don't accept Starbucks partner numbers here. :(

-Across from us there is a pair of shoes made of a baguette.  Yum...?

-We almost have a bit of a heart attack each day when we see prices on things like a Juicy jacket that says $1,650 and remember thats HK dollars, not US... I mean we can't afford it in USD either, but at least it's a little better.

-Its 2am right now where y'all are reading this from.  sweet dreams :)