Happy New Year everyone. I am going to interrupt my blog posting sequence for a couple weeks so I can post two stories related to the new year in a timely manner.

I was looking forward to spending New Year’s Eve here, because Hong Kong is known for its fireworks display. And while I did get a little lazy about where I watched the fireworks, I was not disappointed.

There were a couple NYE activities posted on Meetup, but one was with a Twenty-something group, and the other was a harbor booze cruise. After years of getting shanghaied into all day sailing trips when I lived in Annapolis, I knew better than to get onto a party boat with drunken revelers lest I end up having to swim to shore to escape.

I decided to start my NYE celebrations by treating myself to a burrito. As a California native, I find it to be one of the foods I miss most when traveling. A few days earlier, I noticed a Mexican restaurant on a walk and made a point to save it to my maps. I returned and ordered a burrito with all the fixings: sour cream, salsa, and guacamole.

Naturally, it wasn’t as good as a true California burrito, but it was a reasonable substitute, and I enjoyed watching the local Hong Kongers take a stab at eating Mexican food. Holding food with your hands seems foreign to locals here. At one dinner, I even heard them boast of eating potato chips using chopsticks. Everyone I observed struggled to eat their food with a fork and knife, especially the flat tacos.

After dinner I headed over to the Lan Kwai Fong District. This is the equivalent of Koh San Row in Bangkok and similarly, you’ll find it filled with expats and tourists drinking at street side bars. In a few hours it would be teaming with people, but for now most were just taking pictures of the street.

I settled into a bar I’d walked into by mistake earlier in the week. While I’d been waiting for a Meetup event, which turned out to be at another location, I’d looked at the menu and saw that they had both an Old Fashioned and a Manhattan. These are drinks that are usually difficult to find in Asia because bitters aren’t that common.

You could sense the calm before the storm as I sat on a tall bar stool to enjoy my cocktail. The only other people in the place were a couple who sat across from me beneath a painting of a woman in a skirt lying down and holding a dog above her head. The couple were lost in each other, and the bartender didn’t seem to have interest in making conversation so I finished my drink and headed home.

Knowing the fireworks would be launched from the harbor, but given the challenge of navigating the narrow Hong Kong sidewalks under normal circumstances, I dreaded the idea of getting to and from the fireworks with a sea of people who’d already demonstrated a lack of spatial awareness during the past week I’d been here.

I considered climbing up the stairs to the walking path behind my condo to watch the fireworks, but as any of you my age or older can attest: the older you get, the more difficult it becomes to summon the effort to stay up until midnight let alone go out.

Realizing that my condo would be closer to the fireworks anyway, I decided that maybe I’d just head up to the 41st floor lounge to watch them. I didn’t know if there’d be a special party, but I was delighted that the only effort required would be taking the elevator up at about 11:45. What I hadn’t considered was everyone wanting to come down the elevator at the same time.

I wasn’t aware that my building actually had a rooftop patio on the very top of the building, but I followed a group of people who’d gotten off my elevator. Not surprisingly, the roof was fairly packed with drunken ex-pats, and after a quick reconnoitering of the patio, I decided to head down two floors to the lounge. It turned out to be the perfect place as it was filled with the older, more conservative folks who wanted to enjoy the New Year in a more subdued way.

There was a little ruckus as the countdown began and cheers as the fireworks started. I’d found a perch on a wide window sill where I could sit, and the late comers pressed up against me, but no one but a window cleaner could have obstructed my view.

The fireworks lasted about 10 minutes and I was pleased that you could hear them, even through the glass. I thought it weird that someone turned on the TV, but it made sense once I realized the fireworks were choreographed to the music.

Once I realized that I’d seen the grand finale, I leapt up from my sill and bolted for the elevator. I figured it would take the drunken revelers upstairs a little longer to make their way, and I was right. The elevator arrived almost immediately. I got down to my apartment, stripped off my clothes and was in bed by 12:15!

Sure I took the lazy approach or maybe it was just the more efficient approach. Either way, I would make up for it the following day. I had agreed to go on a New Year’s Day hike and failed to take the time to convert meters to feet. It ended up being the steepest hike of my life!