On Thursday Haiwen and I went to HongKong. Haiwen had to take care of some business and asked me to come along. OK! We were a bit tired because we had New Year’s drinks with the Dutch Consulate and the Bencham the night before. The event was held at the Paulaner brewery in the new TaiKooHui mall. That is a super bling bling mall in Tianhe. We had a good time and some nice beers. Lexie spent the night at grandparents Feng because we got home late and had to leave early in the morning.

Bodysuit by auntie Monica.

We got on the 9.03 through train, which was sold out. Actually all the trains up to 12.12 were sold out. Luckily we already bought tickets earlier. I was a bit afraid that traffic might be bad and the train station chaotic but everything went smoothly. A big difference between the East railway station and Central staion. Last few weeks there were about 800.000 people leaving from there each day (!). It’s exodus time leading up to Chinese New Year. Pfff, two New Years in one month is a bit much!

The plus side of taking the through train is that there are only so many people to go through customs at the same time; no more than can fit on the train. Other border crossings, like LuoHu, are packed with people.

Since Haiwen and I have a HongKong ID card now, getting through customs was a breeze. We inserted our card, went through, left a fingerprint and, tadaaa, we were in HK Very, very nice!

Haiwen went to take care of business and I went ahead to meet Ans and Mickey for lunch. Chiel and Haiwen also joined us. What a different set of people we were, compared to the last lunch, a few days before Lexie was born! Ans and Chiel have been in Holland and Florida in the mean time. Chiel ran the Goofy, which is a half and a full marathon in one weekenend and Mickey spent 6 weeks on an ice breaker in the South Pole region, combined with a visit to New Zealand. Well, what changes HW and I went through you already know .

After lunch HW and I took the ferry across the harbor and went to buy a Nespresso machine. We’ve been using it for 2 days now and the coffee is great. Definitely a great parenting tool!!

A visit to H&M was reasonably successful. I just bought some boring basics because the rest still doesn’t fit. Even size L mama collection is not generous enough for my over developed top half now :S Unfortunately the were out of L sized leggings I did buy a nice dress and a red rose to brighten it up a bit.

By then it was almost time to head back to Guangzhou. Boarding started early because the train (17.50 KTT) was sold out. In fact there were no more tickets available for the rest of the day. We were not in the mood for unnecessary queueing so we had a little snack first. When the lines were gone we went in as well. The trip back was fine.

Now it’s Saturday afternoon and I will tell you about that another time.  x