Day 6: Hong Kong - Show day
Nau mai
Yesterday we played our first headline show in Hong Kong.
To get to the breakfast at Hotel Eaton in Hong Kong you must take the glass elevator from your room high up in the top levels of the building all the way down to the basement. In the basement of the building is a multilevel foodcourt, a dormant foodcourt, but with a section that opens up at this time of the day to serve hungry travelers. After walking down another couple of flights of stairs you arrive on the very bottom floor, B2, a wide open setting of tables and chairs that is ringed by counters and various stations that serve many of the great breakfasts from around the world.
On this morning I was not feeling adventurous. I stuck to fruit and pastry, serving up sliced pineapple, honeydew melon, watermelon, mandarins, yoghurt, croissants, pain au chocolat, and a sausage bun.
I went straight back to bed as my belly attacked me from the inside with knives. In between those fierce moments of internal conflict I was able to spend a generous amount of time trying to implement a functioning BOTHEW scoring widget. One day I plan on learning how to get the columns to align properly and removing the Softr logo, but for now I must be satisfied with a readable and accurate scoring system.
From the photos submitted it looks like the troops went out for a wander after breakfast and got themselves some delicious iced coffees. And it seems that Tristan met a very large cat.
We assembled at 3pm to take a transport to the venue. It was a smaller bus than our airport transport, just an ‘out and about town' bus, and they also provided a cargo van to carry the equipment. For twenty minutes we drove through Hong Kong’s skyscraper-lined corridors before pulling into the basement carpark of a tall building in the northeast of Kowloon. As we disembarked from the bus we watched a van pull out of the building’s cargo elevator and drive off towards the street while a grey Mercedes driven by a confident parking attendant was swiftly and skillfully reversed into the elevator car, the couple of inches of clearance either side of the mirrors providing ample room to get this job achieved.
We took a different elevator upstairs into the venue as we were not a car. This place was Portal, a modern music space that felt cold and sterile by day but would certainly brush up nicely when the correct lighting was employed during the show. It was a pretty easy and relaxed evening with ample time to soundcheck and then relax in the brutal fluorescence of the green room. The support band Kowloon K brought us a big bag of Hong Kong snacks and we tasted all of them.
