May 2-4 '12; Hong Kong

And now, finally continuing with my posts about my trip in Asia...

Surprisingly not hit by the JetLag bug, I ventured off into the wonderful Asian city! Staying at my aunt's place is probably the best part of this trip. No hotel fees! Although you may not know this, the ability to allow people to stay over at your home is quite hard in Hong Kong since houses are much much smaller than that of Canada. Luckily, my aunt loves me (and now my friend who travelled with me) and gave us her spare bedroom to share. So, with us perfectly rested (that means an average of 5 hours of sleep in Hong Kong) we started our adventure!

First, how could anyone say they've been to Hong Kong without eating at a food stall?! Though some are fancier than others, they’re all good. Mostly. And to be honest, I have a feeling that the dirtier they are, the better they taste. Disgusting right? I know, but I can’t help it! We got grilled squid and curry fish balls – the epitome of Hong Kong street food culture. For 10 HKD (hong kong dollars) each, I’m ridiculously satisfied. For those of you who don’t know, 1 CDN dollar is roughly equal to 7.8 HKD. So the two bowls of snacks cost me a little over 2 dollars. WHAT A DEAL!!!

Hong Kong Street Food (Top: Curry Fish Balls; Bottom: Grilled Squid)

Lounge Area at the Cinema

We also decided to watch The Avengers since we knew that if we didn’t watch it now, we never would have the chance to since the movie would’ve been out of theatres by the time we came back to Canada. In Hong Kong, all movies are sold as IMAX sales in the way that you always get to pick your seat for your show. I personally prefer this method since you don’t have to get to the theatres an hour early just to get a good seat. Also, Hong Kong sells sweet popcorn as opposed to salty butter popcorn. Crazy right!? Though I still much prefer butter popcorn, I got some sweet popcorn, just because, it’s me and I’m a sucker for anything popcorn. The cinemas itself are much nicer than ones in Canada, especially since we were at the IFC mall in Central, a slightly more ritzy mall in the city. The seats were like leather lounge chairs. Quite nice. As for the actual movie? Awesome! The Avengers was much better than any of the individual movies, except Iron Man. That night was also the night that we learned that the MTR (subway system in Hong Kong) did not run past a certain hour. Since we watched the last show of the day (a midnight showing), we missed our subway and had to take a taxi home. Good thing my aunt lived close by! Though, really taking a cab in Hong Kong is probably at times cheaper than paying for TTC. How sad.

Luxurious leather seating in the cinema

Me and B.Duck

Next, we ventured off to Sogo in Causeway Bay. SOGO is an Asian department store, much like Macy’s in the States. This is where I fell in love with a brand called B. Duck. It’s an absolutely cute duck and their products range from aprons to bathroom utilities. Of course, this meant that I had to have a shopping spree here! But that will be mentioned later, as I didn’t actually do my shopping at SOGO.

Strawberry Cream Puff @CocoFrans

Venturing in the MTR system, unlike the TTC system, is a breeze and sometimes quite pleasurable (as long as you don’t go during rush hour). They tend to have many snack places and bakeries for you to buy some more food! We bought a Strawberry cream puff at CocoFrans. It was really pretty, but too bad it didn’t taste as good. Mind you, it wasn’t bad, just not as good as I expected it to be. Oh Well.

Yoshinoya Beef Bowl with a HotSpring Egg

We also had afternoon tea at my favourite fast food restaurant: Yoshinoya. This is a Japanese fast food chain. They mainly serve beef bowls but they have expanded to also offer chicken teriyaki bowls as well as Hot Pot meal sets. We went there for their teatime special (between 2pm-5pm if I remember correctly), which was $26HKD for the meal set. It has definitely stayed as my favourite fast food restaurant in Hong Kong; the taste was exactly as I remembered it.

For dinner, we went to a sushi restaurant in Mong Kok. It was really good. We had a seared sea urchin sushi, blue fin tuna with sea urchin sushi, and a whole palette of sea urchin. Can you tell that we really love Uni? The price was quite reasonable. Along with other dishes that we had, the total came up to approximately $20CAD a person. Pretty good for some fresh sushi!

A Collection of Uni items (Top Left: Seared Uni Sushi; Top Right: Blue Fin Tuna w/Uni, Bottom: Uni Sashimi Palette)

Lychee Panna Cotta

Another place that I really enjoyed was a dessert house in Sai Wan. Their Lychee Panna Cotta was to die for! A Perfect late night dessert before bed. For the three days we had in Hong Kong before heading off elsewhere, we tried to cram in as many restaurants as possible… I think I’ve succeeded.

What are you favourite restaurants during your travels? What specialty foods have you come across when traveling? Any comments on good or bad transit systems in other countries?

May 1st; Day 1

Off to Hong Kong! Got super embarrassed at the check-in because I decided to get a ‘kids meal’ instead of a regular person’s meal and the lady looked at me like “are you sure?!”… it sadly was quite embarrassing, just thinking about it makes me cringe…

Food on the plane was decent. Since I ordered a kid’s meal my meal was served first before everyone :) firstly comes chicken nuggets with curly fries accompanied by peas and carrots. The highlight of my meal was the Hagen daaz that they served as a dessert. I was so worried that it would melt I decided to eat it first only to find out that it was frozen rock solid! Took me a good five minutes to gnaw through the first bite. Still, getting ice cream on a plane is always a plus.

Slept like a baby with a crick in my neck. A nice mandarin lady sat beside me. She didn’t know a word of English so I got to translate the menu items for her and practice my mandarin for the whole flight. She somehow introduced me to her son via the pictures that she took with him when she went to Canada to visit him. I now know way too much about him and she gave me his number so that I could ‘meet up’ with him once I was back in Toronto. Ya right, not sketchy at all when I met him. I can just be like “hi, you don’t know me at all but I met your mom on the plane and she decided that we should be friends, wanna chill some time? Nice lady but a little delusional. I kind of felt like I was in a matchmaking session when she described and showed me pictures of her son.

Breakfast: was kind of shitty. Had pancakes that had a funny aftertaste. The granola bar was sadly oatmeal so it was just super fibery. The yogurt was good, but really, you can’t screw up yogurt. 

All in all, I give airplane food a 6.5/10 because the breakfast was not at all enjoyable. On my trip back I’ll make sure not to get the kid’s meal to save myself from embarrassment and a shitty breakfast!

We arrived at the Hong Kong airport at 5 in the freaking morning, we thought the airport bus would be running but the first bus was a 6:50 so we decided to take the taxi. The bus driver had quite a hard time trying to fit in all our pieces of luggage…

For my first breakfast in Hong Kong, I had a fried pork cutlet burger, and yes, that is a perfectly legitimate food item for breakfast. It was surprisingly good, it had a bit of gravy sauce in it and the bun wasn’t dry at all :) For a person who doesn't really enjoy bread items, this was actually really good!

For lunch, we went to the super hyped up rotating sushi place called “genki sushi”. The food was good, you get to choose which plates you want to eat by taking plates of the conveyor belt in front of you. The sushi was fresh and enjoyable although it was a bit on the pricey-er side of things.

We went to “Satay King” (direct translation) for afternoon snack. SUPER good food there! I had a white curry pork culet meal. It was super yummy :) I highly suggest that you go during afternoon times because the set meals are a bit cheaper than if you went during the lunch hour.

All in all, a good first day. Super busy but lots of fun. I'm not foreseeing a lot of sleeping time during these next 5 weeks.

What is the first thing that you do when you get off the plane? go on an eating frenzy? or maybe try to fix your jet lag?