Wednesday, June 30, 2004

I'm in Phuket!

This is heaven. I'm sunburnt and full of seafood.

Have to go now to wash all the seawater out of my hair before my 2-hour in room massage.

Lates!

Saturday, June 26, 2004

Crazy taxi drivers, sangria, jazz hands, and shameless professor-sandwiches. In other words, another Friday night in HK

Last night the people in my program had a "Thank You" dinner for our program Director, Peter. We met at a Spanish tapas restaurant on the other side of the island in an area called Stanley. Dinner was great and full of interesting conversation, two kinds of sangria, and a surprisingly talented guitar group.

OUr taxi driver on the way back was an absolute riot. He seemed intent on imparting to us (in loud Cantonese) his views on dating. A few pearls of his wisdom:
--If you don't pick up a girl in Lan Kwai Fong by Friday night, you will have to "take things into your own hands" on Saturday and Sunday.
--White men love to have Asian wives because they can cook
--White girls are most desriable at ages 15, 16 and 17 (eeew!) while asian girls mature later.
--It's okay to have weekend flings at nightclubs regardless if you're married or not
He then proceeded to turn on the lights of the taxi to check out all the girls!
Yeah he was kind of a perv, but he was so hilarious that I didn't feel offended at all.

We ended up at D'Apartment, a dark basement club that was decorated to make you feel like you were at a house party. I ended up having some great conversations, especially with Peter who we all agreed has to be the coolest law professor alive (see picture of me and Didi sandwiching him below--oh my, is that against university guidelines?).

I got pretty drunk and remember having an all-out eighties dance-off with Randy, complete with running man, attempted moonwalking, the Carlton, and jazz-hands.






Wine and conversation at dinner... Posted by Hello

And then as the night wore on.... Posted by Hello

Sangria pitcher, candle, and fork Posted by Hello

View of Stanley from the tapas restaurant we ate at last night Posted by Hello

I got another haircut, and it's even fobbier than the last one! Posted by Hello

Sunday, June 20, 2004


I love HK Posted by Hello

Me, Nat, Adam, Jeff Posted by Hello

View from thr rooftop pool at my hotel Posted by Hello

Swetha, Lisa and me at club Ing (again). What can I say, its open bar all night.... Posted by Hello

The girls in front of Club Ing Posted by Hello

I'm this happy every day. Posted by Hello

Food

We are discussing living somewhere else for the next month but I have to admit—I want to stay in this area because I have discovered where a lot of the good hole in the wall restaurants are.
From now on I will use the abbreviation HITW (Hole-in-the-wall). Being unable to read Chinese, I have no idea what the names of these restaurants are, so I have listed them by the food I regularly order. All of these places are less than a 2 minute walk away—in fact most of them are just across the street.
Prices, as you can see, are insanely cheap—they are listed in Hong Kong dollars, and the exchange rate is US$1 to HK$7.8


Hainan chicken breast rice with vegetable $15
BBQ crispy pork and vegetables on rice: $15
Char Siu and vegetables on rice $15
I eat here most often because you can get skinless chicken breast rice for $15 here, and it’s absolutely delicious. If you eat in, you can play count-the cockroaches. As a result we now always get our food to go. The men who work here are legends in my mind. There’s the chef, who is the most disgusting of creatures—he has a large potbelly, is always sweaty, oily and shirtless, has only one visible brown splotchy tooth that looks as if it’s going to fall off, huge scabs on his arms, and you’re lucky if you come in and he isn’t scratching either the scabs or his head with his bare hands. He always tries to talk to me in a loud booming voice but he slurs and it takes me awhile to understand what he is saying. Once, we were eating inside and he inexplicably came out of the back door (2 feet behind our table) shirtless and rubbing his wet head with a towel like he had just come out of the shower, and then stood in the middle of the room and continued to dry his hair. I can’t complain though because he makes some of the best chicken I’ve ever tasted.
The guy who chops the meats (the butcher?) is really nice but rarely talks. When the chef isn’t looking, the butcher points at him and makes “he’s crazy” loopies around his ears at me.
There’s another guy who stands at the door sometimes. I think he’s the butcher’s brother. He and I sometimes make small talk—he is very friendly and will give me and my friends a discount if we order at night (food is usually more expensive at night).
I think the people who work this store live upstairs, so the store is s sort of living room for them. An assortment of relatives and friends are always over watching TV or shouting over their gambling losses. I’m going to miss this place.


Meatball noodle soup $11Meatballs: Fish, beef, fish with green onion, pork with mushrooms
Fresh Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce: $6
All of the workers here are women. All but one of them think I’m crazy. This is because one night, after I had been drinking, I felt like some soup noodles and ambled across the street to their shop. The lady who doesn’t think I’m crazy suggested I have gong yuen, and I understood that it was a meatball so I agreed. I went back to the hotel and discovered it was the most delicious meatball I had ever tasted (pork with salty mushrooms inside), but since I was buzzed when I ordered it, I forgot what they were called. For the next two weeks, I would walk in and order meatball noodle soup, and each time they would give me a different kind. They were all delicious but I was searching for the elusive kind I had that night. I kept describing it to them, but I described it as a beef meatball with vegetables inside instead of pork meatball, so they told me time and again that they didn’t sell this. I must have asked the same lady four times, and each time she would say “um, you were here yesterday trying to order the same thing. Let me repeat: we don’t have it.” Finally one day last week I ran into the same lady who gave them to me the first time, and she said “Oh, you must mean this” and gave me the right kind of meatball. I think I caught at least one of her coworkers suppressing a giggle.

Sliced goose (boneless) on rice with vegetables $30 (add $5 for goose gizzard)
Across the street from the hotel. The family here is very nice, and the cook says that this HITW is famous in the neighborhood for its goose. They always make conversation with me. This is the family that gave me food from their dinner table.

Wonton noodle with side of fried pork chop: $15
Six fried dumplings: $11
Mango in cream with sago: $9
Mango with black sticky rice: $18
Meat dumpling in fried bread: $2 each
Pork and Thousand year old egg congee: $10
Rice ball with shredded chicken inside: $7
We call this place “that amazingly good restaurant” because, well, it is. The ladies there are dismissive and rude and look at us like we’re total foreigners and always greet us with “what do you want??” repeated every 30 seconds when we are trying to decide, which is completely excusable given the surpassing quality and price of the food. About 5 people max can fit, really cramped, into their eating space, so we usually get food to go. Their pan-fried dumplings are divine, and for $15 you can get a huge bowl of wonton noodles with vegetables and a side of fried battered spicy-salt pork chops.

Ham, egg and cheese sandwich $10My breakfast place, since it’s on the way to school and their eggs are tasty.

McDonald’sIt’ s notable that the ice cream cone is $2. I’ve only tried ice cream here, because with all of the great food around, who wants to eat at McDonalds? I do, however, want to try these interesting-looking menu items before I leave:
Salmon nuggets
Pork nuggets
Corn Pie
Red Bean Pie
Mc Kroket (haha, just kidding)

testing  Posted by Hello

Saturday, June 19, 2004

Blog is fixed!

Thank you Z, I am forever indebted.

Today I went to eat sliced goose rice with goose gizzard at the hole-in-the-wall across the street. The family who run the hitw (abbreviation for hole in the wall) was sitting down to dinner when I arrived. I apologized for interrutping them and the lady said "oh no problem, you have to eat dinner just as much as we do!" I ordered and requested that they include some vegetables in the box. She said, "We've already sold all the vegetables today, but...do you like squash?" I said yes, and she gave me some squash from the plate they were sharing at the dinner table! I felt so included, like they were inviting me to eat with them. Sigh.

Oh and btw the entire conversation was in Cantonese. I'm so proud of myself.

More food updates and pics to come on Monday!

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

Oops I need some blog help

Hi guys, ahem....Z
(or anyone else who knows how to fix this problem)

I changed my blog template and now I can't figure out how to get my links and stuff to display nearer to the top of the blog in the sidebar...scroll down to the bottom of the blog and you'll know what I mean. Can anyone help? Pretty please?

Great Book Alert!

I am currently reading Ghostwritten by David Mitchell.

I picked it up a few days ago at the Hong Kong Book Centre (really a rather small bookshop on the basement level of a huge skyscraper). It was published in 1999 but for some reason my finely tuned good-book radar didn't pick up on it. It's nine interconnected sotries about people from all walks of life, starts out in Okinawa and then moves to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Some mountain in China, moving west and ending in a nightclub in New York. Sophisticated, edgy and unpredictable--just how I want to be one day.