Love on the Rocks?

Okay, so this one is about a month late and while most of you are thinking green bare with me as we reflect on pink & red.
For Valentine's Day, I planned an excursion to Stanley on the south side of Hong Kong Island. It's a popular vacation spot and city for foreigners to live. There is a charming little town on the water, with new developments such as nice walkway along the water, trendy restaurants overlooking the ocean, touristy markets and new shopping centers filled with coffee shops, gelato stands and McFood.
We found this Valentine's display near the amphitheater and couldn't resist.

A shot of Rufina on the waterfront. You can see a little brown rocky patch behind her; they will be in a later photo.

This is actually down the road a little bit at St. Stephen's Beach. I was able to rest a little and take in the view of the ocean.

The big building behind Rufina is the Murray House. It used to be located near Victoria Harbor on the north side of Hong Kong Island, but it was later moved to Stanley so they could develop the business district. It now houses a maritime museum and some fancy restaurants. One interesting note, apparently somebody forgot to label the parts when they were taking the building apart to move it because when they put it back together, they had several large columns which they didn't know what to do with. Oops.

This is a wide shot of Stanley and the bay. If you look at the lower part of the photo you can see a row of columns. Those are the aforementioned extra parts.

Speaking of things I had mentioned. This is Rufina and I playing on the rocks that were in the shot of Rufina earlier. It was funny to see all the couples trying to snap photos on these rocks- especially considering most of the women were wearing heels and dress shoes.

We found a great little place to have dinner called the Pickled Pelican. We ate upstairs next to the window and had a good view of the water and the people walking along the coast.
We both got fish and chips, which were quite good. Rufina is holding up the card and passport I made for her.

Here's a closer shot of the passport. I made and decorated a little passport out of construction paper for her. In it I put little sections like "Bus", "Beach", "Dinner", etc. I had a little booklet of heart-shaped stickers that I used as "stamps", so as we completed some of the activities I had planned, she got her "visa stamp" in her passport. We also drew little pictures or wrote captions with the stamps to remember the event.

One of the last things we did was enjoy some desert. I got an caramel apple crumble and Rufina got this lemon meringue pie that looks more like something from Red Square or a Buddhist temple in Thailand or Burma. Both were quite yummy.

We finished the night off with a bus ride back to town, but not just any bus ride. We had taken the express bus down to Stanley, but we took the slower route back. We sat on the front row of a double-decker bus as it careened around the tight curves of the narrow road that snaked through the mountains back home. It was like riding a roller coaster without the safety bar in our lap.