Eating and shopping (but mostly eating)

As my friend said while reading the Hong Kong guidebook, the two things to do here are shop and eat... Jaclyn took care of most of the shopping (though we did a bit too), but all three of us (four while Rita was still here) took the eating comment to heart!

One notable aspect of Hong Kong cuisine was the variety. We quite happily sampled everything from masala chai and Indian curry to Vietnamese pho soup and spring rolls. Of course, we enjoyed many a traditional Chinese meal as well, such as hot pot, dim sum, and lots of fresh seafood.

Dim sum is fun! It's usually a brunch or lunch option where there are lots of small prepared dishes on trolleys. As the trolleys pass by, you can take any of the small dishes. Usually each dish has three or four portions of dumplings, pork buns, etc. These are shared among the people at the table, so the more people at your table, the more variety of dishes you get to sample.


One of my favourite meals from when I lived in China was hot pot, so when Jaclyn's cousins Mike and Cynthia suggested going to a hot pot restaurant, I was excited. A hot pot meal consists of a pot of boiling hot broth on a burner in the center of the table where you cook the noodles, tofu, vegetables, or meat that you order. It was a fabulously good meal!



One night we went out for seafood—fresh seafood—and I mean fresh! When we arrived at the restaurant, our dinner was still swimming around in aquariums outside the door. We pointed out this fish, and those clams, and that crab... they were scooped out of their aquariums and, fifteen minutes later, they appeared piping hot on our table. And they were delicious!


We also indulged in lots of the snacks that Hong Kong claims as specifically theirs. We dined on red bean and green tea ice cream, pineapple buns (that don't actually contain pineapple), ham and preserved egg congee (a type of porridge), egg tarts (though Macau claims these as well), fishball and noodle soup, and lots and lots of milk tea.

On an amusing note, although Hong Kong really is a large cosmopolitan city, there still is a touch of the rural roots you rarely see in the west. For example, a few days ago we were in a large shopping mall and as we left, a man in a chef's hat wandered through the front doors and headed for the nearby restaurant...carrying a large slab of raw beef!

Ahhh...food! It really is one of the best reasons to travel!