Afternoon at Elements

We spent an afternoon last week having lunch and hanging out at the Elements mall in Kowloon, across the water from Hong Kong island. This is a newer mall, 14 months old. We at lunch at Lei Garden, a famous Cantonese restaurant with a few locations in Hong Kong, and which made the the newly created Michelin list of restaurants for Hong Kong. It is a huge restaurant with several seating rooms, very stylish and modern, yet with Chinese flair, filled with loud chatter, packed at the peak of lunch hour, boasting a large aquarium for its seafood. The sweet and sour shrimp was excellent, very crispy, and is one of the phrases David knows in Cantonese, ku long har (I may be romanizing incorrectly, but this is what I hear). Afterward we walked around and stopped in at the new W hotel adjacent to to the mall, which had a lovely lounge where we played checkers. Despite my having at one point 5 kings to David's 3, he still won. He won all 4 sets of our checkers game, although I got close a few times, I couldn't outsmart him.