We took a cable car up to see Ngong ping 360 village Sunday and had a lovely, sweaty day.

The cable car took us 600 meters above sea level, and we had stunning views of HK, the airport (so many takeoffs and landings), and the bay below. We saw locals digging for shellfish in the shallow waters, and very brave hikers dealing with the extreme heat.

Sharon's Auntie's friend's husband is in charge of branding and development for a restaurant group that alsp happens to own all the Starbucks in HK. After a long afternoon, we came into M&C Duck, one of his developments, and found her Auntie and her friend dining. They invited us to join, and ordered us a surprise meal of the best dishes (or her favorites, anyway). The branding was absolutely adorable, and the food was perfect. It was a balmy hot night and everything was light enough to really enjoy (even the fried oysters, which came with a lovely salad of a vegetable I've never seen before and they couldn't translate for me). Mixed-Chinese+Western fusion style. I highly recommend. Obviously the special is peiking duck, but it was too hot to eat that this night.

Shaoxing is a city about an hour and a half away from Shanghai, and is historically been a fabric trading city. I visit there each time i am in China to find new fabrics for my company to use for the next season. It's a much smaller city (kind of a Boston versus NY situation?) and I like it very much. It's prettier with little canals running through, and a cleaner, quieter, less expensive environment.

Sharon's favorite restaurant in Shaoxing (mine too, but I've only been to two restaurants here, and one served brains... So...) closes at 2pm, so after our office work, we had an early lunch to get us ready for many hours in the fabric market. The pedometer clocked it at 3.68 miles, so it's good we fueled up.

This is a Korean BBQ restaurant that is near the office we were working with, and close to the fabric markets. It's a chain, with 5 locations in the US that I need to find.

Note: this is from last Thursday and would not load for many days.

Now for the worst meal in all of Asia... Bagel (a legit bagel anyway!) with some beautiful looking lox.... But I tasted a dab of the cream cheese before biting in and it was totally nasty rancid... One of those smell/flavors that you can never be free of.

They replaced it with a plain bagel, many many apologies, and comped the meal, but gross. I can still taste it In my mind. Note to self, just don't ever eat cream cheese again. They were very nice about it, but waiting for the replacement meal used up all my potential pool-side-sitting time.