February 12th, Very Early in the Morning

I have been awake since around 3am as my internal clock is kind of messed up.
We left Cambridge on Sunday morning, drove to NYC and spent a nice afternoon and evening in New York with Sasha and Sydney. We dropped off 3 boxes of records at their apartment and then took a walk through the warehouse section of Greenpoint to get to the waterfront and admired the nicer residential blocks in the neighborhood.

We met my cousins Robert and Genia and Judy's sister Nancy and husband Richard for an early dinner at a Turkish restaurant on 2nd Ave and 50th Street in Manhattan. After dropping off Sasha and Sydney, we went out to Riveredge NJ and spent the night at the cousin's house.

The flight wasn't until 3pm Monday afternoon so we had a leisurely morning with Genia. The flight left more or less on time, but was interminidable, I think around 15 hours in duration. We cat napped on the flight but really had not gotten more than 3 hours sleep. So we arrived at 8pm local time, changed some money at the airport and went on our way. Unfortunately, Judy was tripped by her luggage and landed hard on the marble floor, on her knee primarily and was rather badly injured (more about that later). We met up with Audrey, Jay's (our house exchanger) girlfriend who took us to our temporary home away from home. Audrey is a translator for the Hong Kong government and translates documents between English, Cantonese and Mandarin. We took a bus from the airport to within 5 minutes of the house and then a taxi to the complex Sereno Verde a complex of tall apartment buildings in a gated compound. As it was now around 11pm but 10am in Cambridge we went to sleep, Judy with an icepack wrapped around her knee which was increasingly swollen and sore.

The next morning, Wednesday, we awoke and it was clear that Judy would not be able to do anything more than spend the day with an icepack on her knee in the apartment. Richard went out to do the shopping, totally disoriented, anxious about getting lost and not being able to communicate in search of some food. The apartment was left with no food of any kind so we couldn't even have a cup of coffee or a bit of breakfast. I took the shuttle bus, a 10 minute ride to town, got out at one of the train stops, in front of an elementary school. It was a little after 8am so the bus was loaded with school kids and their parents on the way to dropping them off. I got off to a flurry of "bye bye's", the Cantonese word for good-bye and walked around town. The streets of this town, Yuen Long, in the New Territories of Hong Kong were mobbed with people, even at this early hour. There were a series of main streets and smaller alleys. The smaller alleys had small shops sellling Chinese greens, citrus fruits, cooked ducks and chickens and many many small restaurants and cafes where people sat with their tea and dim sum. I wondered about for a while and finally found a small supermarket, did the shopping for some provisions and walked back to Sereno Verde about a ten minute walk. I took no photos of the town as I think I was too attentive to navigating and didn't want to get side tracked. I will post some photos of the town at another time.

I returned to the apartment to find Judy unable to walk very much and in a great deal of pain. We had breakfast and coffee and more ice for the knee. We decided that Judy would have to stay off her feet and see whether the pain and swelling went down before looking for a doctor. She didn't think that anything was broken but what does she know.

I decided to go off to Kowloon and visit the Hong Kong History Museum and any sites in that area. More about that later and I did take photos. Perhaps I will try to get a little sleep now.