So much food

This past week has been super busy. I'll post more soon, I promise! We're going to Seoul on Thursday, and then we're staying in a villa on Boracay in the Philippines the weekend after. We're also in the middle of booking our hotels for Japan, since we're going there for reading week!

We went to Repulse Bay, a beach on the south end of Hong Kong island. It was pretty empty, and the tourists from mainland China who were there would come via tour bus, get out, take a picture of the beach, and leave. There are two extremes that people follow here: hiding from the sun (wearing masks, hats, umbrellas, etc.), or baking in the sun until you're crispy. We went to Pizza Hut for lunch, since it was the only thing around. Apparently Pizza Hut here is the biggest date spot... mid-upper class restaurant. But they don't do cheese very well in HK, and the pizza sauce was thousand island dressing... so yeah, that was not good.
 

Tried a new restaurant in Kennedy Town that was slightly more expensive than we had hoped, but still really awesome food. The restaurants here close on weird days and at weird times, so new ones are always popping up that you never noticed before. Closed restaurants have a garage door in front of them, so you can't get a good feel for what exists unless its open.

We went shopping in Causeway Bay, home of the coolest malls and stores I've ever seen. We went to Uniqlo!! Best store, although the one in Japan is 3 times the size. Saw some cool clothes at an awesome store called Aland that you could probably only pull off if you're a super fashionable Chinese girl. We also went to an AMAZING bookstore called Eslite, which had some really high end tea and accessories like fountain pens, notebooks, and postcards.

Great shirt:

For dinner, we went to Din Tai Fong, which is a Michelin star rated restaurant that serves Shanghai dumplings - aka dumplings filled with soup! So delicious. check out the pics below for instructions on how to eat them! Its just like regular dim sum, but with soup inside.

We explored a really cool area called Sheung Wan, which has a bunch of stalls full of old Mao paraphernalia, antique Chinese art and statues, and trendy new restaurants and bars. We saw this coffee place that makes something called "ice drip coffee", which was the contraption in the pic below. You put ice on top, and coffee in the middle, and then it takes 8 hours to... steep... I don't know, I don't drink coffee. Whatever.

We went to an old temple, pretty cool, lots of incense. Also this was on Yom Kippur, so I teeeeechnically went to temple... and then had shrimp dumplings for lunch. Whoops!

Goddess of fruit?

We found a restaurant called WAFFFLE! that served waffles. It was pretty good, and they poke holes in the waffles and put chocolate pieces inside.

 

I do go to class, contrary to what some people might think. And just outside the law building, there are soooo many koi!

More shopping in Causeway Bay - a bra store called Bubies:

We went to a place called Jolly Thinkers, which is a board game cafe. We were running late for dinner, so we just went in to take a look around, but it was pretty cool! We'll definitely be going back.

And then we saw a movie about Toronto. LOOK AT THESE COMFORTABLE MOVIE CHAIRS!

My roommate from Kingston came to visit, since HK was the last stop on her honeymoon. We went for dim sum, and I finally tried chicken feet. Not bad, but its like you're eating chicken skin and sauce. And you have to avoid the TOENAILS!

Candy!! Actually found out that they're called jin deui. Not that I can pronounce that.

We went searching for a place called waterfall park, and found these awesome statues and mini shrines!

Here's the waterfall! It was in a residential area, and we had to hop a fence, but it was really beautiful! There was also an old WWII pillbox next to it that we checked out.

That's all folks. I'll be sure to post my pictures from Macau later, mostly featuring Portuguese egg tarts (of which I ate 3).

Got the chop

Long time no blog. Its been really busy here, but I'll try to fill everyone in on how things have been going!

So far everything has been really awesome. I'm really starting to settle in here, and I've done a lot of cool things and eaten a lot of delicious things!

I've eaten two of these bad boys. Nothing is better than a smarties McFlurry. I'm still angry at Canada.

We went to Kowloon last week and checked out the sneaker market and the goldfish market. The sneaker market was just a couple of streets that had tons of shoe stores, and we roamed around looking for a pair for our friend. He was way too picky, so he went off on his own to search and we checked out the goldfish. They're really cool and cheap here, apparently people have them for luck.

In a pet store in Kowloon, I found grumpy cat's brother:

Went back to the Limestone Arms for trivia night, which we were obliterated at. All of the questions were for middle-aged British ex-pats, and we didn't stand a chance. We had lemongrass chicken fingers and french fries with a curry dip. The place is owned by a Brit and his Thai wife, and they make delicious food.

We decided to try a durian, which is a fruit that STINKS but supposedly tastes good. It does not. Its kind of like a pungent tropical fruit with the texture of a stringy banana. It was awful, and the entire kitchen stunk. Apparently sometimes if you try to get in a cab with a durian, the cabbies won't let you.

This is what's for lunch on campus... yayyy... Its a pasta salad with thousand island dressing (?), fish roe and crab sticks (??) and apples (?????). Not awful but still really weird. Their take on western food isn't the greatest. But there is a great cafeteria on campus that has really cheap curry and BBQ pork and rice, so that's good. Plus starbucks has a red bean green tea muffin, and they heat them up here before they give them to you, so it tastes like warm cake. So awesome.

We went out on Wednesday night to a place called Lan Kwai Fong, which is a huge bar and club spot. Its about 3 or 4 streets, and its completely packed. There are places with super cheap drinks too. We always start our nights out with what we call the "7-11 Pub Crawl", where we drink cheap beer from 7-11 on the street (its legal here), and then go dance at a bar. We got these hilarious light up hats and devil horns that we wore around all night. It was pretty rainy, so it wasn't that busy. But we went back to LKF a couple of nights later and it was disgustingly packed. Way too many people, but it was an experience nonetheless.

Good start to one of my classes...

We read on Open Rice (an app that's like Chowhound for HK) that there was a place to go for really good dessert. In truth, we were looking for egg tarts, but we found this place instead. Its called Sugar Cake or something like that and they had these really interesting tiny tarts and cakes, and we split 2 of them between 4 of us. Then we went and got egg tarts, because we're gluttonous. These egg tarts were really interesting, because they were deeper than normal, so you eat them with a spoon! Delish. I highly recommend trying them in Chinatown in Toronto too, I bet they'd be just as good.

We went to a district called Wan Chai, which is a bar and restaurant area near Central. We found a Vietnamese place in a Lonely Planet book called Dalat, and we decided to try it out because it was cheap. Oh man, it was good. Probably the best meal I had in HK at that point, and it was soooo cheap too. Came out to about $9 CAD for pho with lemongrass grilled chicken and a shared appetizer of THE BEST SQUID EVER. This picture can't capture it. Every bite I had, I went "mmmm", it was that good. The restaurant also had a bunch of interesting French dishes, like that tomato-ey looking one.

Good Girl Gina, spotted in Wan Chai...

I had a full day conference to go to for one of my classes on the legal status of transgendered and transsexual individuals, which was really interesting. A huge debate was sparked about whether Gender Dysmorphia should be in the DSM-V, and some of the world's leading experts on the subject weighed in. Very cool. After the conference, we took the Star Ferry to Kowloon to watch the famous light show on the waterfront... I wouldn't recommend it. It was really cheesy. But we went to the avenue of the stars, and saw Bruce Lee's statue and a bunch of people's hand prints in the boardwalk. And the skyline was really cool, especially the cool boat in the water.

One of our friends has a friend here who is a food critic. So she told us to go to this place in Kowloon for Korean BBQ. Holy crap it was good. That thing on the grill was the most incredible piece of meat I've ever eaten, and it wasn't even marinated in anything. I don't know what they did to it. Magic? Probably. The lettuce is for you to make a lettuce wrap with kimchee, meat, and a spicy peanut sauce. Definitely our most expensive meal so far, but it was only about $27 each for all of this, and we were stuffed!!

My favorite sign:

I had another conference day to go to, and after a discussion on the Christian view of trans* people (supposedly God made man in his image, God doesn't have a gender, therefore what gender was Adam? The way this question is answered can have interesting implications for trans* Christians), I left so that we could go to see the Big Buddha. Its on an island near Disney Land, and we were supposed to take a gondala up to the top, but it wasn't running for whatever reason. So we took a long bus ride to the top. The first thing we said was "wow, that really is a BIG Buddha". There were also wild cows and bison roaming around on the island which was pretty cool.

Last night, we went back to LKF. We went to a bar in the back of an alley that was super cool, and had really expensive drinks but maaaan were they good. I had one with watermelon juice, gin, honey, and Tabasco, and it was insanely good. Then we hung out in the street, and got jello shots at another bar. We found another bar for dancing, and we danced until 3 A.M. The main reason why we stayed out so late is...

LATE NIGHT DIM SUM! Yes, there is a place in Kennedy Town called San Hing that opens at 3 A.M. Its full of shift workers and students, and we got there right at 3:05. We actually saw them making the dim sum, which was so cool. Their signature dish is called lau sa bao, or runny custard bun, and it was this hot, fresh, delicious custard inside of a sweet fluffy bun. It was so good, that I felt incredibly depressed that my friends and family back home will never get to try it! I mean even if you do visit HK, its all the way in Kennedy Town. I've been craving it all day today. 2 hours from now and I can get one if I really want!

And I found this while grocery shopping today... pre-packaged "candy".

I think that's enough for one night. I'll try to be better with my blogging, but I've barely had any time alone this past week, we've been so busy!