We wake up to a wall of rain. A literall wall of rain. I look through the window, and I struggle to see my surroundings.
It’s Monday, so the girls have breakfast and start their school work for the week. Mondays are for Social Studies, and are usually a fun topic for them both. After that comes a bit of math added in, before we consider ourselves done for the day.
After Joe’s failed attempt at securing a post office shipping box on Saturday, Téa and I head down to the post office. The post office takes 5 minutes, and then… We just can’t resist the smells coming from the bakery across the plaza! We head over to Saint Honoré’s bakery, and promptly call Joe to inform him that we are picking up lunch, and what do he and Maylin want?
Because we’re not heading out to a restaurant today, we’re staying close to home, I try to recreate my favourite milk tea at home. I’ve been working on perfecting the recipe, but I’m not quite there yet. The café/restaurant version of a milk tea is much more concentrated than I can ever make at home, but with three tea bags per batch (two Ceylon, one Iron Buddha), and a healthy dose of evaporated milk, I get as close as I can. It’s still delicious, just not that punch in the face of tea.
Our task continues now that we have a box. I start packing all the things that we want to ship ahead to Vancouver, and load up the entire box. Before I know it, we’re at the top of the box, and that is when we realize that if the big stuffies are coming home with us, the girls will have to carry them on the airplane. Or possibly we could vacuum pack them?
Once the box is closed, Joe brings it back down to the post office. Maylin goes with him, to “help”. At the post office, he tapes it all up, and the attendant helps him ensure that all the paperwork is filled in correctly. HK$1100 later, and we no longer have to carry this 13.5 kilos of stuff through airport transfers, no more paying for overweight luggage through our remaining means of transportation, and we feel literally lighter.
Joe and Maylin pick up some meat and vegetables at the market. Maylin has requested a congee for dinner, and Joe makes sure it has lots of extra foods in it. A congee can be as plain as just rice, salt and water, or it can be flavoured with an entire turkey carcass (like the day after Thanksgiving!) or all sorts of flavourful add-ins. Today, Joe chose lean pork, Chinese cabbage and choi. But! We also have a secret ingredient, a salted duck egg, this one is covered in soot!
The soot will clog the plumbing, so it needs to come off in large lumps before I can rinse off the remainder. I scrape the egg with a sharp knife so the soot lands back in the plastic bag each egg comes in, and then rinse it off so that Joe can plop it into the congee while it cooks. The egg is raw but salted, so we usually cook it in the shell and then spread the small pieces of intensely salted hard boiled egg in the meal we’re making. Sometimes we have it on top of white rice to add extra flavour to the meat and veggies we’re eating, but today, it gets stirred into the congee. It adds a whole other dimension to the meal!
It’s been another calm and peaceful day in the apartment. I am craving a walk, I’m craving movement, but at the same time, we needed this rest. Might as well take it while the world outside is so very wet. These apartments don’t have insulation, so if it’s cold outside, it’s cold inside. The walls do their best at keeping the elements out, but the cold seeps in. So even though it’s cold, we actually put the AC on for a bit. With laundry always drying in the living room and the master bedroom, we are trying to get the humidity out. The AC helps. We bundle up, and our clothes dry. Heat will return later this week, we hope.
We settle down after dinner, dishes and showers, onto the couch with another movie. I grab yesterday’s Muji snacks and try the Original Flavour Fish Bones. These are crunchy, fried or roasted, fishy snacks, they’re fun to crunch between the teeth, but tiny and not really all that flavourful. We probably should have gotten the spicy ones, the girls don’t really enjoy these anyways, so next time I’ll grab the ones with more punch.
And so that’s our Monday! Not all that exciting, but we needed the pause. More exploring tomorrow, with our batteries fully recharged!