12/11/10 - 13/11/10: Celebrating a year in Hong Kong
To celebrate our anniversary of being in Hong Kong we embarked on a couple of firsts. On Friday evening we went for our first hairy crab! The crab is a famous delicacy in Shanghai cuisine. The crab meat is believed by the Chinese to have a "cooling" (yin) effect on the body. It certainly has a distinct and more powerful flavour than a typical crab and eating it is quite an event!
The next day we went to our first gig in Hong Kong. In 2002 Q magazine named The Flaming Lips as one of 50 bands to see before you die, so it seemed like a good opportunity when we saw that they were due to play in Hong Kong. Astrid was keen to see them as they brought back memories from her exchange student time in Oklahoma (The Flaming Lips happen to be from Oklahoma City).
We had no idea what a gig in Hong Kong was going to be like but we could guess; 1) expensive, 2) well-behaved 3) in the middle of no-where. We were right on all three accounts, the tickets were 620HKD (about 55GBP) but we did get to see the Raveonettes as support who were really good. The venue was the cavernous Hall 10 at the Asia World Expo which is right out by the airport and represents a bit of trek from Causeway Bay. The crowd, a good mix of locals and ex-pats warmed-up by the Raveonnettes in fine style, looked on in awe as the craziness of the Flaming Lips show was set-up and then unleashed in front of them and onto them which included the group emerging one-by-one from a door half-way up their video backdrop, lead-singer Wayne Coyne's 'space walk' surfing the crowd in a transparent zorbing ball followed by the release of tens of huge balloons and the manic-firing of confetti guns and bombs - it was quite a spectacle! Coyne later emerges with giant laser-firing hands, firing the lasers at huge glitter ball and smashing a huge LED-enhanced gong.
No comments:
Post a Comment