we explore a Canadian monument and a Canadian past-timetime

...christmas and bali pics to come...

Yesterday was a gorgeous day, so we took advantage and went to Kowloon Park.

And enjoyed some McFreezes at a McDonald's ice cream stand that was set up there. Yup, McDonald's here has stands AND ice cream treats like McFreezes which are slurpee's with ice cream on top, with a flavoured swirl through the ice cream... YUM!
And... we paid a visit to this Tlingit Blackfish Totem Pole, which was presented as a gift from the people of Canada to the people of Hong Kong by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney on the occasion of Festival Canada in 1991.

Did you know we'd given Hong Kong such a memorable gift? How nice we could appreciate it. And then the girls played in the playground. We knew it was warm enough that we didn't need jackets, but really we could have been in shorts. We weren't the only ones overdressed- there were bundled up-but-sweaty kids running around everywhere!

(too cute for words!)

Mike was "shootin' the breeze" with this gentleman for a very long time.
And then we walked around and saw the flamingoes and black necked swans that live there.

Today we tried skating for our first time here. If our little Canadians are going to live in a country without snow, we probably should still remember to teach them to skate. Luckily, there are three malls i can think of offhand, all fairly close to us that all have skating rinks in them.
This was Leila's first time on single-blade skates, and she did really well! Better than I expected. She was willing to try to take little steps on her own.
Annie, however, was spaghetti-legs at first! She had been doing so well by the end of last winter that I had hoped it would come back to her, but it didn't seem like it was- she seemed worse than I'd remembered. But then we got her a penguin to push around, and her confidence came back. She didn't want to quit. She was try to do some crazy moves, and kept encouraging me to not follow her so closely (aren't they supposed to be teenagers when they say that?)


We ended it off with a visit to the park that is above the mall. Annie makes friends in playgrounds so easily. Maybe it's the age.... Anyway, we love holidays! (Except when we're sick. We think it may have been Dengue fever that we all had, but mostly we seem to be better.)