Bling and Tree Branches (This week's Photo Hunt themes)

Talk about a challenge -- or two. This being a Saturday, I'm referring here, of course, the Photo Hunt meme -- specifically, the effort of coming up with a single entry that combines the themes for this week that have been separately thought up by Sandi and Gattina. For, truly, my first thought when seeing them was that they were worlds apart!

An early look through my photo archive yielded nothing, so I felt prompted to actually go out and take new photos especially for this entry. Fortunately, I decided to do so at the right time -- before the Christmas decorations had come down in many parts of Hong Kong, including purveyors of major bling like the ritzy Pacific Place mall (which I only usually go to for its Great Food Hall, whose cheese selection actually is good value as well as wide, and multiplex cinema).

In keeping with its super high end reputation, the festive decorations at Pacific Place mall could actually be described as more understated than at several other shopping malls in other parts of Hong Kong (who really do go to town with their Christmas-themed decorations each year). At the same time, there's still so much shiny ornaments on the trees that it's hard to see any tree branches amidst them all (and, of course, the evergreens' plentiful leaves)-- even though they are in fact there!

More than incidentally, I'd say that Pacific Place -- with its opulent mall, three five star hotels and one "premium luxury" boutique hotel -- is the kind of place that such as the Hong Kong Tourism Board would like people to think is typical of "Asia's World City". The truth of the matter, of course, is that it's not the kind of place that most denizens of the Big Lychee would think to go to -- regularly or irregularly.

Still, for those who are apt to dismiss the place whole sale as not being really Hong Kong, I think there's some irony in that the mall's un-Asian sounding anchor tenant (Harvey Nichols -- whose flagship branch was established in 1813 in London) is actually owned by a Hong Kong tycoon named Dickson Poon -- who may be best known to fans of Hong Kong cinema as the producer behind movies such as Yes Madam and Royal Warriors starring his ex-wife, Michelle Yeoh! ;b