Expediccionado: I could really use a peg leg.

My right foot was feeling so badly today that I decided to mostly sit at home and keep it elevated so that the swelling would go down enough that I could get my shoe on comfortably. While I would have loved to have been out adventuring around, it did give me an opportunity to catch up on a two-day overdue blog entry. I did manage a couple of short outings today, however.

First, Charlie, Elena and I met Tony at Maxim's Palace (no, it's not Maxim magazine's version of the Playboy Mansion - it is a restaurant) at City Hall for dim sum. If you have never had dim sum, you should. It is a unique dining experience, and fortunately, can be found at many Chinese restaurants in the US and elsewhere.

On the way to the restaurant there was a lot of traffic due to people just getting out of church, tree maintenance, and a protest, all of which our taxi driver complained about in Cantonese with hand motions and a simple English snippet of "stupid people".

We could see preliminary groups of amahs beginning to form. Amahs are what you might call domestic servants, cleaning women, nannies, or maids and in Hong Kong the good majority of them are Filipina. Sunday is their day off so they gather in just about any space there is to gather (on sidewalks, under pedestrian overpasses, and various other nooks and crannies of the city) and just hang out. They share meals, play cards or other games, chat and laugh, and even sing karaoke and dance. It goes on well into the evening.

I was trying to discreetly photograph a couple of the groups outside City Hall but was apparently spotted by the glaring woman in red on the right.

So I went inside City Hall and spied on them from above.

From here you could also see where more of the harbor is being filled in to make space for what I assume will be several more tall buildings.

We made our way to the floor that Maxim's was on. The restaurant itself was huge and completely packed so we had about a 45 minute wait. This was my first glimpse into the gastronomical chaos while waiting outside for a table:

The way dim sum works is that the wait staff move down the aisles between the tables with wheeled carts on which are various food options. The carts have signs on them to tell you what they are offering, but alas, they are all in Chinese. According to Tony, even if you know all the characters, you still may not know what they are offering because the names of the dishes are so poetic. So you just point to what you want and they put it on your table with its corresponding sauce and mark it on a tally sheet. After you're done, they add up your sheet and you pay your bill.

These two steamer baskets contained rice noodle wrapped veggie goodness, one with greens and the other with mushrooms inside.

Fried cuttlefish tentacles.

Big rice noodles folded around clumps of shrimp.

After dim sum we headed back to the apartment where I continued to loaf while Charlie ventured out alone to Graham Street Market (see previous journal entry for his contribution to the blog).

In the evening we put on some nicer clothes and made our way back to City Hall for the Taiwanese Contemporary Legend Theatre's rendition of Medea, a play by Euripides. It was the most impressive stage show I have ever seen. It was done in Chinese opera style with elaborate costumes, makeup and dramatic singing, but was very modern in terms of the stage setup, lighting and interpretation of the play. It was intense, sad and sometimes terrifying. Of course, photography was prohibited, but here are some pictures that might give you an idea of what we were looking at.

Hai-Ming Wei as Medea.