Picture of the Day: Ancient Selfies

A "modern antique" hand-painted cabinet at Tate Dining Room

Tate Dining Room is a fine dining French-Chinese restaurant, where each dish has a story that are linked with an underlying theme.

Chef and owner Vicky Lau presents dishes with refined and delicate tastes, reminding you of classic French cooking techniques, but also flavours might be modern takes on classic Chinese.

The dining room is understated yet elegant, the tables thought out, complete with a pull-out drawer for utensils.

Earlier this week I was there for an assignment and examined a Chinese-style "modern antique" cabinet in front of the private dining room.

My eyes wandered around the hand-painted cabinet and noticed the woman in the pavilion was holding something strange... a smartphone!

She was taking pictures of herself in ancient times! Very cute.

Tate Dining Room
210 Hollywood Road
Sheung Wan
2555 2172

Enough with the Self-Obsession

Everywhere you look in Hong Kong, people are taking selfies

Recently some colleagues and acquaintances and I have been talking about how people have become so obsessed with social media that it's become completely absurd.

Do we need to know what you're drinking?

There's a new hipster coffee shop that opened in my neighbourhood, and now every weekend there are throngs of people there -- just to take pictures -- to show that they are at the latest hot spot. Once they get their cups of coffee, they take selfies with the waterfront in the background, or the shop behind them.

The shop is located on the corner and there's heavy traffic right in front -- with so many people around the store, there's bound to be a car accident because people are too busy concentrating on taking pictures of themselves.

My colleague sarcastically joked that these people were proving that they had ticked another item off their bucket list, or that their social media posts would include hashtags like #lifegoals or #nocoffenolife or #goalaccomplished.

So getting a cup of coffee is an accomplishment?

Another acquaintance told of visiting a Japanese pancake shop, where the pancakes have egg whites folded into them to make them thick and jiggly, the latest dessert trend in Hong Kong. She reported that the customers who arrived just before her were a young couple.

Why not eat the pancakes instead of taking pictures of them?

She was there for about 45 minutes to make a video at the shop, take some footage of the signature pancakes, and eat them. When she was leaving, she noticed the couple was still sitting there, the man looking very bored and hungry while his female partner was still taking pictures of the pancakes from every conceivable angle.

Surely the pancakes were stone cold by then?

And then yet another acquaintance who was in a restaurant in Taiwan recently, and he saw the group of people next to them get up and go, and left behind a dish that was completely untouched. They had only come to photograph the food.

What a waste.

She wants to show everyone she had a bubble tea here

He also said he was in a cafe and a woman sat in a corner and was taking non-stop selfies of herself -- for an hour.

When will this self-absorbed obsession for likes and followers end?

How about putting the phone down and instead of focusing on taking the perfect picture, how about focusing on the moment?

Silk Road: Zhangye Danxia Geological Park

Minerals and sandstone helped create these colourful rock formations

One of the highlights of the Silk Road tour was visiting Zhangye Danxia Geopark. It took a while to get there, and once we arrived, we had to board the park's own buses to tour around the place in a kind of hop on, hop off style to four different spots.

Located in the county of Zhangye, in the foothills of the Qilian mountains, the park covers 322 square kilometres and it's very impressive -- the hill formations look "rainbow" coloured, with layers of colours formed due to deposits of sandstone and other minerals over a 24 million year period.

Each spot in the geopark looked amazing

And the colours and the rock formations really are cool -- it's kind of like the Chinese version of the Grand Canyon, but with brightly coloured hills in layers of red, orange, white, green that seem to go on and on.

Each location seemed more amazing than the one before, providing dramatic backdrops for people interested in selfies and group pictures. It was quite hot that day, not scorching, but enough to warrant a hat and some sunscreen.

For the most part people were respectful of the environment, though a few did go out of bounds to get what they felt was a better shot. Our tour guide quickly reprimanded them and they complied. One more step and they could have fallen down the hill...

Some areas allowed visitors to have a good overview

There was a sign that said no aerial cameras, probably meaning drones, but there were lots of selfie sticks...

We were so lucky to come just before Golden Week so there weren't that many tourists. And since the park is so spread out, there was lots of room to move around freely and take good shots. Somehow I feel like the pictures I took didn't even capture this awe-inspiring place properly...

Picture of the Day: Grammar Gripes

What's wrong with this picture, besides the women?

The standard of English continues to drop in Hong Kong and no one seems to care or want to do something about it.

The latest faux pas is found in the MTR, where JCDecaux has placed ads in the trains promoting Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum.

"Want To Take Selfie With Celebrities?" it asks.

Shouldn't it be, "Want To Take Selfies With Celebrities?" It's plural because there are more than one celebrities and selfie is a noun?

Last night we went to K11 mall in Tsim Sha Tsui to get to the hotel attached to it for a dinner. The basement of the mall says "Molecular Marche"... what exactly does that mean?

If you do know, please inform us! Inquiring minds want to know...