New Year's Day...

...yesterday supper with my nephew and his family. With me here, my twin sister, daughter-in-law and great nephew. Hong Kong is not only amazing for life lived at ground level - alleyways, streets and roads filled with people shopping, trading, men and trolleys trollying things into vans and out of vans, markets, bakeries, shops filled with elaborate gold jewellery, but, if you've seen the 2nd Bladerunner film, it lives life upwards through100 floors in the same way. Huge blocks tower up, clad in coloured light displays like inside out kaleidoscopes. Even the accommodation blocks are lit up from behind their big glass windows. It's mind-bending to think about how on earth Hong Kong can service all the apartments, how there's enough pressure to get all the water up to the tops of the buildings and get the waste water safely away, how the gas and electricity make their ways to the top via every level from ground to 100. My son and his family live on the 46th floor so you can see how important a functioning electricity grid is! This evening we had hotpot...which isn't meat and potatoes baked in layers, it's more like a fondue where you have four flavours of constantly bubbling spicy oil and soups in the centre of the table and a collection of things to drop into them and scoop out when cooked - such as strips of beef, mushrooms, eggs, lotus root etc., and various sauces to dip them into. Haven't quite got the jet lag right, I keep waking at about 3am and reading for an hour or two.