Day Twenty-One – 21st Nov 2008
Hong Kong
23:58 – Salisbury YMCA, room 1439

Today was the last day of our trip—the next day-and-a-half will be dedicated to travel—so we agreed on a change of pace. After a quick coffee we headed to a small building on Hong Kong Island which has many small shops sandwiched together, all selling designer clothes. The catch is their stock is limited and you never know in advance what it will be.

Although we spotted some great discounts on high-end clothing, none of it really caught our eye. We moved on to some small samples shops with no-so-high-end stuff. Again, not a great selection so we continued on.

We had a lot of trouble in some other malls and department stores locating clothes we liked at prices we can afford. It seems there are either ultra high-end clothes (Chanel, Hermes, Ralph Lauren) or Target/Kmart-type clothes but little in between here.

For kicks, we headed back to the chic Harbour View centre to check out the expensive stuff. I spotted a TV measing 103”, almost twice the size of our (quite large) 55” TV. Massive!

I bought a new pair of shoes and we stopped for dinner at yet another burger joint –Triple O—which was filling. I don’t know what it is about us, Hong Kong and burger joints.

A new, quirky Japanese store—Muji—had just opened so we bought a few bits and pieces there. While in store, I spotted someone with an “H&M” bag. As Justine likes this store and we hadn’t seen it thus far, I asked where the store. They pointed it out on our map and as the hour was late we had a mad dash to make it before closing time and still allow shopping time. But we had ample time (I’m sure Justine disagrees).

It’s always sad at this point in an extended holiday. We’re upset to go home but it’ll also be great to be home.

Photos taken today: 0
Photos taken to date: 5047

Justine and I frequently do our grocery shopping on weekends, since we find it difficult to do it during the week. This past weekend, we were too busy to even contemplate going shopping, which left us with a choice: Buy food or end up having take away all week.

Sure, the take away option sounds good, but it’s expensive and the food isn’t usually as good. On Sunday, we decided that we would try one of the online shopping services.

Coles Online is the better known of the online grocery stores — at least to me; the service launched a few years ago now — eight? nine? — though the availability was very limited. Safeway (Woolworths) also has a service: HomeShop, which appears to have launched four years ago.

Since we shop at Coles — our closest supermarket is Coles; the local Safeways are dirty and have rude staff — we decided to give Coles Online a shot. The first thing I noticed is that the design of the site does not appear to have changed since the first time I checked it out, which just so happened to be a few weeks after it launched. The second thing I noticed is that the site is slow. Molasses slow.

HomeShop, on the other hand, is a far nicer-looking site, loads faster and just seems to be a more user-friendly and polished experience.

Using our regular shopping list (we just jot it down on paper located in the kitchen) we added all the items to our virtual trolley. It took quite a while navigating the site, as finding items only by their name is not as easy as recognising the packet.

Eventually, we had our shopping list, and proceeded to checkout. HomeShop charges (for us, at least) between $7.50 and $10.00 for delivery, depending on the times and delivery window. Conveniently, though, they deliver during the evening. We chose a 5-8pm window, though a 6-9pm one was also available. This delivery window was $7.50, but as we were first-time customers, the fee was waived (which we didn’t know until the final total was presented).

All that was left was to wait. So wait we did.

At 7:50pm the delivery truck arrived — and I expect this would be the norm — with our bags of groceries. Everything we’d ordered was included, as well as a sample of Nivea face wash. Why? No idea. The ice cream was a tad melty, like it’d been left in the car for an hour or two, but everything else was fine. We included fresh fruit and vegetables in our order and they all looked fine; some looked better than in-store produce, likely because it came directly from a warehouse.

A fuel discount voucher was also included — with eight cents off, which is twice our normal discount.

We didn’t get any meat, as they don’t offer the brand of chicken we buy and I like to choose my cuts of beef. The delivery may be a bit more expensive, but we refrained from impulse purchases. All in all I can see us using HomeShop again; since it saves everything you buy in a list, successive shops will be significantly faster.

At Coles today, while doing our weekly shopping, I realised that the new Macro Wholefoods store had been open for almost two weeks and we hadn’t visited. We’d been wanting to check it out since December when they originally had planned to open.

So, we dumped what was in our trolley and walked to the other side of the shopping centre to visit.

Macro is an organic supermarket, they sell fresh fruit and vegies as well as a lot of packaged stuff. Since Justine and I were planning on having a salad with our dinner, we bought organic salad from Macro as well as a few other things: linguine, pork chili & fennel sausages, a pumpkin and mushroom calzone and a packet of Red Hot Blues blue corn chips (and a few other bits and pieces I forget).

Eating the salad this evening, is does taste a little nicer; the lettuce and spinach leaves seem… “better”, I don’t really know how or why. I don’t think we’d do our regular weekly fruit and veg shopping there though, things cost pretty much double what they cost from Coles; and you even get free chemicals from Coles!

While doing our fortnightly shopping at Coles this evening, I noticed that (not for the first time) that not all of the TVs showing the ads over and over (and over and over) were working as well as I’m sure Coles had planned.

The application running the advert loops on at least four of the TVs in two different aisles had crashed — in two different ways. From what I can remember (and I wasn’t really paying attention, which now isn’t helping as I attempt to recall), the software they were using is called “Mediabox” or similar.

So there you have it. What other public displays have you seen crashed? I recall seeing a large screen that regularly ran trailers at Village Knox in a crashed state. There’s a whole heap more over at windowscrash.com if you’re still interested.

Update: Just as I hit “submit” on this post, The Comedy Channel died and had a “please stand by” type message for around 5 minutes. I wonder if it’s me?

This evening Justine and I went to the Ted’s store in Knox so I could purchase an el-cheapo tripod and a remote switch for use with said tripod — this also allows bulb (i.e. pretty much infinite) length exposures.

After waiting like what-seemed forever (though was in reality around 30 minutes; there were way to few staff and too many customers wanting stuff) I finally managed to spend money in their store. The staff at Harvey Norman were much better as far as customer service was concerned, and probably on par in regards to knowledge (at least from what I overheard). I would have purchased the stuff from them if it had been in stock.

Funny that, I used to hate Harvey Norman but now my recent experiences in their stores have made me realise they’re not too bad afterall. But I digress.

I have just posted three new shots to my flickr photostream, one each of our mice — oh yeah, Justine bought some mice around six weeks ago — and one half of the lion statuepair that guards the entrance to our house. There is quite a lot of detail in the large versions of the photos on flickr, but the ‘real’ versions have even more detail! Enjoying the camera, I just need to get a bigger lens and then the only tiny matter is getting good at taking shots…

The other day I posted about Kerbside Shopping in our area. Today, I am pleased to take stock on what is left on our kerb:

Nothing.

That’s right, the last four chairs (two generic wooden, and two crappy bamboo) were taken some time today. I doubt the collection people took them, since everyone else’s stuff is still there. It is, however, possible. I prefer to think that some scabs took them.

It’s the time of year where many people decide to go “Kerbside Shopping”. What is Kerbside Shopping? Well, it’s when an entire suburb has put out their “hard rubbish” for collection. People drive around that area looking for — well, free crap that other people no longer want. Even though it’s an offence, it seems quite accepted and no one seems to care at all.

The collection begins tomorrow, so we decided to put some old stuff out for collection today. Some people had left stuff out for over two weeks, even though the brochure we received says not to put things out so early.

In the spirit of giving, we put out three black chairs (with a wicker sitting-bit) which were perfectly fine but we didn’t like, three other assorted wooden chairs in various states of disrepair, a 50-year-old exercise bike in fine condition which is uncomfortable but otherwise OK and a 24-port 10Mb switch which may or may not work.

As we were putting out the stuff, I saw a station wagon loaded with old crap pass by. Over the past week both Justine and I have seen people stopped at various houses piling through their loads of crap. I noticed the people who live across the road from us (not the behemoth house, not the statue house, the other one) peering over at what we were placing on the nature strip.

We put all these items on our extremely thin nature strip (it’s about a foot wide) at around 3:30pm today. At around 6:15pm today I had to go to the local supermarket The three black chairs, exercise bike and switch were all missing. Someone had obviously gone “Kerbside Shopping” down our street in the past couple of hours.

I wonder who took our old crap.