No Fishing from Pier

It's very overcast here now. And smoggy. Pictures end up gray and I feel like I have a cold, but I don't really, it's just the pollution. Also, my shoes seem to be hurting my feet. I will look for a more comfortable pair today. Enough whining!

On a mission for find some HK Won Ton soup, we headed down to find the place that won "Best Won Ton Noodle Soup" from the HK Tourist Board in 2003. It was gone (or moved), but along the way we saw this cool marketplace. Instead, we went to a little divey place and had shrimp wonton with egg noodles. It was great. We decided to take a stroll and see the "Temporary Market" we passed by on the street earlier. For Americans who are used to having their animal products displayed for them in neat, plastic-wrapped styrofoam trays, this might be a little shocking.

Chicken before:


Chicken after:


The darker guy in the background kills the chicken and then he and some other guy pluck it. The guy in the foreground cleans out the insides and does some detail-level plucking and cleaning and then bags it up.

After the market, we went looking at the food section of a grocery store. You think fratboys are brave for "eating the worm" out of a bottle of Mezcal? I would like to see them fish THIS out and eat it: Think of the Police song.."Lizard in a bottle.." There was another selection that had hard liquor with three kinds of penis added. That's Friday night in a bottle for Richard Simmons! There were lots of teas and dried beef but we just looked at it all and passed.

We decided to go for a stroll by the Convention Center (Wanchai). A note about strolling in Hong Kong. You get assaulted by Indian guys trying to get you to go to a tailor shop and get custom-made suits. I was a particularly attractive target for these folks. Jeremy notes that there is little "pret a porter" for my size in HK which may account for it. Here is one of these guys: you can spot them a mile away. They sidle up to you like they are selling crack.

While strolling we happened upon a well-dressed feline. Well, it was dressed, anyway, even if not in the latest fashion. We got to the convention center and decided to take the obligatory picture in front of the gold thing (name forgotten). While we were doing this, we noticed that the other picture-takers were going about their tasks with a bit more zeal then we were. After a while (5 seconds?) it got funny to us. Funny + Jeremy + Camera is a good combination.

Afterward we decided to find a place to sit down and write some postcards. Before we got there, we saw an old man fishing through a grate in the sidewalk down into the harbor. First of all, Hong Kongs means "Fragrant Harbor", but, and excuse me if I said this already, it's not so nice a fragrance these days. Still, the amazing thing is that this guy is fishing through a grate with a little hand-held line. We could not figure out what he would catch or how he could pull it through the slats on the grate. Here are some pictures:

Nonchalant guy
The grate
Dinner on his mind

We stopped and had a couple of drinks and listened to a guy belt out oa series of the cheesiest 70s pop tunes ever on his casio keyboard. Yes, the real action is at the Ramada. We headed out to dinner and had a bad Japanese meal. This was due to awful planning. I took no pictures and would prefer to just forget about it.

Cutting through a building we saw this piece of art. Don't give horny nationalistic artists paintbrushes when they are drunk. For the sake of the kids, please!

The next day we only had a little time to get something to eat before we headed out to the airport. We thought another Dim Sum place would be fitting and had a quick snack before heading out to the Kowloon station airport check-in. These things are brilliant. You check in your bags and get a boarding pass in the city, then take a train into the airport and head to your gate. Tokyo has this too. It's a great system. Here I am with a real Hong Kong policeman. Not the Jackie Chan kind, but, heck, they were busy fighting the triads.



So it's "so long, Hong Kong" -- I am sure to be back. Lively place, nice and interesting people, great food. What's not to love?

Official Hong Kong food taster

First of all, Lisa from Florida is getting a present because she is the only person to leave a comment on my blog (you don't have to register to leave a comment...just click on "comments" at the bottom of any post). As far as I know, she's the only one to read this blog, and probably just once.

It's OK. This is a good journal for me and will help me remember and relive the trip as my memory lets bits of pieces of it fade away over the years.

Yesterday was food day in Hong Kong (L.L.L. would say that *every* day is food day here, and she's right). Before we could head out for brunch, Jeremy had a little bit of adminstrative work to take care of in the form of a single-entry visa back into China. We poked our head into a few travel agencies staffed with Indian folks who said "No" until we found an Amex-authorized office where they took care of getting the Visa done and also dropping off the passport back at the hotel. Not only that, but they recommended a Dim Sum place for us to go. I asked them (three women) "If a man asked you out to Dim Sum, and you didn't like him very much, which Dim Sum place is *so good* that you would go anyway?" After a little translation help from Jeremy and some tittering and discussion (did they even understand what I asked?) they all concluded that the Hotel Peninsula was the place to have it. Then then volunteered that there was another place that "wasn't so fancy" but was good, and, more importantly, right around the corner. My friend Duan says "Hunger is the best sauce!", well, proximity is a close second.

We dropped into the Dim Sum place and they took our order. Thank goodness for the English menu. Jeremy could read all the Chinese writing well enough, but the descriptions in Chinese were flowery names for the dishes, not the ingredients (the English menu had both). I was pestering Jeremy too, until the English menu showed up. "So, Serge, do you want to order a Dragon's tooth dumpling with Lucky sauce?" I don't know! The Dim Sum was great. I am sure that we ate at a mid-level factory style place, and there are better ones around, but I never had Dim Sum this good. Everything was lighter and more complex in taste than what I am used to.

Here are some of the dishes. If anyone has problems with bandwidth, let me know and I will link the pictures next time:

A shrimp dumpling with a little chili mix on top:


The Shrimp dumpling gets Jeremy's seal of approval:


Siu Mai with crab roe


Char Siu Bao


Sweet steamed dumpling. Yellow ones were egg custard with coconut, others were red bean paste


I will link to the other pics from dinner and the harbor:

From Dinner at East Ocean restaurant:

Soup with Shark fin (boo), Sea Cucumber, Chicken feet, Scallops, Ham, Mushroom, Sea Snails.


Stew with Oysters, Scallops, light crunchy unknown green veg like romaine lettuce, 'Fat Choy' also called 'hair vegetable', and pig tongue.


Large prawns fried in shell with a sweet and savory spice mix


Clams with fried garlic and beanthreads. Far and away my favorite taste of the dinner!


Whole Soy Steamed Fish (Perch-like) with scallions

Jeremy sez, I misspell: "you tsai". Looks like GaiLan without the flowers...

Rice served in Bamboo with pork, chicken, and black fungus and scallions

Happy New Year Cake -- Glutenous rice flour and some other flavors. Very nice.

Dessert Soup, sweet with ginger and sugar. Had pieces yams and taro inside.

And here is a combination Seafood/Internet place that we *didn't* go to...


Ah, I forgot one thing that we did. While walking around, we say an herb shop that was selling some strong herb ginseng tea. We got a couple of cups, about 75 cents each (US). That tea was strong!!! It didn't taste at all like the ginseng I have had, and I bet there were other things in it. There were lots and lots of people lining up to get the stuff. I started off bitter but by the end I was really enjoying it.

Today I am going to try and take pictures of people. It's really terrible outside, the weather that is, so I don't know if we will go to Lantau Island. Actually, it's kind of late, too. Hmm. Details to follow, of course!

I've been in a bit of a jetlagged brain fog, so sorry about the blogging lapse. I ventured out of the hotel yesterday and got total sensory overload. Imagine a block of Manhattan then drop Vegas and Tokyo on top of it, squeeze it to 50 percent of its size, and you've got Hong Kong. Your eyes, ears, and nose get bombarded by everything from the garish, grating, and foul to the spectacular, melodic and heavenly. You can stand anywhere in Tsim Sha Tsui and throw a penny and it will bounce off one restaurant and hit another. If you can't find something to eat in Hong Kong, it's time to look for another planet.

I started off the day with Pho. Yes, the Vietnamese noodle soup. It seems ridiculous, but the place smelled so good I had to give it a try. It was just as delicious as I had hoped, and cost about $5USD. I topped it off with a Vietnamese iced coffee to keep me awake for the day and then headed out to take care of a couple of little things. I stopped by a cellphone store to get a SIM card for my Nokia. $12USD and I could get all the calling and SMSing I would need for my trip. Not bad, except that Nokia has "regionally locked" the phone for use in the US only. Bastids! Hewlett Packard, I read, and regionally coding their inket cartridges so that ones purchased in the US cannot be used in Europe (they had to drop the price in the US because of the dollar's devaluation). So, this upset me, the phone locking. I had the same problem in Malaysia earlier, and will again, and in Thailand and Russia and will all over the world. So I bought an unlocked phone for about $100 and put the new SIM card in it and I am off and running. If anyone wants to SMS me the number is +852 9262 7191. Next stop, a pharmacy. I neeeded a little antibiotic skin lotion (preventive, for when I shave my head). 90 seconds and $10 later, I had exactly what I asked for. This place does TCB on some levels. I stopped and checkout out all the bakeries I passed, drawn in by the sweet aroma, but didn't try anything. The pork flooss buns looked the best. I know, I know, PICTURES! I will get a bunch today (I left the CF card out of my camera yesterday).

I napped for a while and when Jeremy got here from Shanghai I was incoherent for about five minutes. JETLAG! Finally I got myself together and we headed out to dinner. We stopped in a BBQ place and had some BBQ chicken and BBQ goose and a couple of soups. The winner was the BBQ goose. Kind of in-between chicken and duck, meaty with perfect skin. I will have to have more before I go. That dinner was not expensive, I would say around $15.

After dinner we went out for a walk which ended up covering about five miles. I will write about that later -- right now it is breakfast time and there's a steamer full of Dim Sum waiting for us to empty it....somewhere.

Los Angeles and Hong Kong

I pulled an all-nighter getting ready for my morning flight from SFO to LAX. All packed, I drove to the Pleasant Hill BART station for a 5:47am train. I now fly out of SFO instead of Oakland if I can - the BART setup is just too convenient, and it gives me time to relax instead of panic. I drove my truck to the BART station and parked it there. My friend Cliff is going to drive it back to my house (I left a spare set of keys). That's awesome! The train was mercifully empty and I was able to get a seat and keep my luggage close to me. Checking in at Alaska was also a breeze, with nobody else in line. I enjoyed a trip to LAX and got in around 9:30am. Hmm. My next flight did not take off until midnight, so I had some time to kill. I rented a Dodge Neon on the Internet for the day and when I went to pick it up, all they had to offer me was a Chrysler Pacifica. It's a coool modern minivan with navigation GPS. Woohoo! I drove down to Irvine and had lunch with my friend Tony. I noticed that most of the students at UCI (where he works) are Asian, and he confirmed that. The UC system are such hypocrites. They first wanted to "increase diversity" and then decided to have a "merit only" system for admission. Unfortunate, they were busted (at Berkeley) for denying admission to qualified Asian students because they felt the student body was getting "too Asian." WTF? They appointed a CHinese chancellor right after that story broke, and, since then, it seems like it's as close to a merit system as it has ever been. Which is great. UC can be 100% Asian so long as they are the top 100% of the applicants. Why people fiddle around with this stuff amazes me.

Sorry, off on a tangent there! After Irvine I went to Culver City and did a little shopping. A pair of pants and a light jacket for Hong Kong. I got a belt, too, since I left mine at the security checkpoint in SFO. Whoops! I had dinner with my sister and her family and that was nice. Later, my friend Eric met me at the airport and we had a drink before I caught the Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong.

Now, there is something interesting about a flight that leaves LA at midnight and arrives at Hong Kong at 7 in the morning. It's dark outside the whole time. 15 hours of flying at night. What that means is there's no real food service. The usual pampering you get in International business class was replaced with a dark cabin and lots of sleep. I got my share of sleep in and also watched a few movies. I saw a documentary on Death Row records that was really interesting. Another BBC documentary on "dowry crimes" in India was gut-wrenching. Meh, what a world we live in!

Hong Kong Immigration was a breeze, although an officer directed me to take my hat off. Security risk or just demanding respect? Either way, I complied. New country, new rules. Doesn't bother me! Customs was a walk-though, as casual and under-staffed as Amsterdam.

Hong Kong is a very cool looking place. Mountains and high rises and water all smashed together. The streets are narrow and jam-packed with everything. You cannot throw a rock and not hit a restaurant in all the places I saw as the shuttle bus drove me to my hotel.

Oh, that's another thing. Getting to my hotel was fast, easy, and cheap. $11USD train ride from the airport to Kowloon station, then a free shuttle to my hotel. Great! I hope the rest of Hong Kong is that efficient!!! I am going to take a shower and then venture outside. I want to find an ATM, take some pictures, orient myself, get a transit pass, and possibly a bit to eat.



It's a bit overcast, and my window is a bit schmutzy. I am going to get out and take some more pictures and post them. My friend Jeremy will get here from Shanghai around 7pm, and he will head out for dinner, exploration, and drinking. I am so happy to have a friend here! I hate traveling alone. I don't think I will do it any longer. The hotel room is small, for sure, but clean and modern. I've got all the plugs and transformers necessary to charge up my gear and my phone seems to be SMSing just fine here. Ok, time to shower and explore.

I'm Back...and Now I'm Leaving Again!

Well that last blog sure was incomplete! I went to Malaysia and had such a good time with my friend Megan that I didn't bother updating the blog. Bad blogger I was! I ate and ate and ate all the yummy and economical Malaysia food. It took a month and a half to get my weight back down and NOW I am going back to Asia! I am off to Hong Kong and Thailand. I take off first to Los Angeles and have a whopper of a 14 hour layover. I think I will rent a car in LA. I have to be back at the airport by 10pm, which gives me time to see my sister and possibly some friends too.

So I promise to do a better job blogging this trip. I will find a place to host pictures also and get them uploaded. That reminds me...better load photoshop on the notebook!

Electronics packed: Notebook, MP3 player, Digital Camera, Video Camera, Handheld GPS unit, Cell Phone, External Battery.

Books: The Tale of Saladin, About a Boy, Guns Germs and Steel, Middlesex, Helpful Thai Phrases, and "Spotting counterfeit dim-sum"

I have to leave the house at 530am and drive to BART. I will leave my truck at the station. My friend Cliff will swing by the house and pick up a spare set of keys, then ride his bike to the station and bring my truck back. He's an awesome friend!