Sweet and Spicy and Tuckered Out

We came across this old pug in Stanley, a seaside area here in Hong Kong. It was sleeping quite soundly and didn't move or react (or even wake up) when I scratched it behind its ear.

Before and After

i spotted the little (about an inch and a half long) gecko on hennessey road in wan chai, and its bigger, drier cousins in western district.

What's in a name?

So You Think You Can Funky Dance

Hong Kong: keeping it funky since 1984.

Open up and say "Ai yah!"

Villain hitting

Walking towards the IKEA in Causeway Bay, I noticed some old ladies with small shrines set up under Canal Road, using slippers to strike at paper with writing on it. After a little bit of research, I figured out that what the were doing is "Villain Hitting" which is a way of cursing one's enemies through magic. I took a grainy video, which you can check out here:

I tawt I taw a puddy tat

It's The Least Wonderful Time of the Year

It's snake season in Hong Kong. In a few months it'll be typhoon season. Maybe moving here wasn't such a good idea after all...

Oh, deer!

display in the window of a traditional chinese medicine shop

Ch'Obama

Birthers take note! While perusing the market in our neighborhood, I may have uncovered proof that Barack Obama may actually be Chinese:

street meat!

Andrew and I decided to get some meat to liven up our dinner of brown rice and Chinese broccoli so we went down to the market a few blocks from us and got the platter below which had two kinds of roast pork, sausage, chicken, duck, and (curiously) peanuts for HK$20, or $2.50 decadent American dollars! If we don't come down with some kind of intestinal parasite, this will be the best pittance we've ever spent.

dim sum and then some

Today Andrew and I headed out to Kowloon for Dim Sum.


Turnip cakes.


Andrew weighs his options (short ribs in black bean sauce and shiu mai).


Savory pancakes.


Fried pork dumplings and fish balls with clam sauce.

After dim sum we walked to the Star Ferry Terminal, and stopped by a juice stand. I wasn't going to get anything, until I saw this:


I'd been curious about bird's nest soup and figured this would be a good time to try it. I didn't know what "harsmar" was, so I asked Andrew to look it up on his blackberry. When he read the following description from the wikipedia entry, he thought it was an April Fool's joke:

"Hasma (Harsmar, Hashima) is a Chinese dessert ingredient made from the dried fallopian tubes of true frogs, typically the Asiatic Grass Frog (Rana chensinensis)."

Needless to say, I couldn't pass up eating something whose two main ingredients are bird spit and frog ovaries:




It tasted mostly like the coconut it was served in, but overall was disappointingly bland. Lame. I can't even have the satisfaction of saying that it "tastes just like chicken!"

SARSguard

Swine flu is serious business here in HK, so the elevator buttons in our temporary housing are not only covered in plastic, but the plastic is sanitized regularly.

nom nom nom in hong kong

One of the main reasons why we are excited to be living in HK is all of the tasty food avaliable here. On my first night, Andrew took me to a noodle shop where I had the noodles with "assorted meats" (chicken and ham). Andrew had the noodles with ham.



We also had some lovely soup dumplings which were served with ginger and black vinegar, which really livened up the flavor.



The next day we had various pastries for breakfast


Which included macanese custard tart (which is like a regular custard tart, but with a charred top), a coconut tart, and a taro and cheese bun, which i was hoping was more cheese-filled and delightful, but was actually disappointingly bland.

Also not as tasty as i would have hoped is dragonfruit

Which looks like an alien seedpod, but which has the taste and texture of a un-tangy kiwi.