The Shamrock Irish Pub on Ashley Road in Tsim Sha Tsui has been open for awhile now, but tonight was finally the grand opening party.  For two hours there was plenty of free food and drink, so of course they attracted a large crowd.

Now others at BC Magazine are expert in working the room at events for the BCene page, one of BC’s more popular features.  But believe it or not, I’m too shy to do that – to go up to complete strangers and say, “Can I take your picture for BC please?”  But by the same token, the Nikon D700 camera and Nikon SB-900 speedlight are pretty fricking huge, so people see me with that and I suppose they assume I am working – which in this case as I walked by, many people actually stopped me and asked me to take their picture, and I was happy to oblige. (In case you’re wondering, two of the managers had asked me to bring my camera and take photos during the party.)

There was a great lion dance and afterwards we went walking around TST for a bit before heading home.  Several different sets of photos to share below.

(And many of you will be happy to note that I have finally done the right thing – uploaded photos to Flickr first, organized them into sets, and using the Lightbox add-in for WordPress so that you can view larger versions of all the photos without leaving the page.  Can’t promise I’ll always be this organized but I will make more of an effort to do this in the future.)

This first set is from the party at Shamrock.

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And a separate set of photos for the lion dance outside.  Not that I’ve seen hundreds of these, but this was definitely one of the better ones in my opinion.

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After the dance finished and the party started winding down, we ducked into Sushi One on Ashley Road for dinner.  Normally I’m not a fan of the robot belt sushi chains in Hong Kong, but this was actually quite okay and we filled up for HK$200.

Then a bit of walking around, giving me the chance to grab some shots of the Peninsula Hotel and the new Hullett House shopping mall.

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I’d parked the car on the roof deck of the Ocean Terminal garage so that I’d be able to grab some harbor view shots before going home.  Despite the continuing foggy weather, I think I got some decent shots.

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Finally, on the drive home, I pulled over along Sai Sha Road because I’ve always wanted to get some shots of the restaurants there at night.  I don’t know quite what the deal is with Sai Sha Cafe and Country Inn – that these two places right next to each other both serve Thai food and seem to be competing for how many colored lights they can use to attract customers.  But if someone told me that both places had the same owner, I wouldn’t be surprised.  The relatively new Tom Bar + Grill right next door looks positively dowdy compared to these two spots.  The food?  Couldn’t tell you.  I ate at one of these Thai places more than 10 years ago and the reviews on Open Rice for Tom don’t make me feel like running there any time soon.

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I know, I’ve probably over-shared in terms of quantity of photos posted tonight.