It was Wednesday morning, my second full day in Hong Kong. I met up with my friend Evan outside my hotel, and we took the MTR (HK subway) to the HK History Museum. Museums in Hong Kong offer free admission on Wednesday.
After that we grabbed some lunch at a famous Hong Kong restaurant called Tsui Wah. It's a very famous chain. I had a "tea set", basically the HK equivalent of a lunch menu complete with HK milk tea.
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| Victoria Harbor |
Then Evan headed off to class at his university, and I went back to Kowloon to check out the HK Museum of Art. There was a special exhibit about Chinese calligraphy. It was very interesting to see, but of course I couldn't read any of it. Still, the museum was free, and definitely something worth checking out.
We met up again for dinner with Evan's friend and a fellow Baylor grad. He's working in Hong Kong in finance, and took us out to eat dumplings at a little hole-in-the-wall place on Hong Kong island. We talked about Baylor and some of the professors that we had studied with in Business School.
The next morning I got up early and took the Star Ferry across Victoria Harbor to Hong Kong Island pier. From there I picked up a ticket on a boat to visit one of Hong Kong's Outlying Islands. Hong Kong is made up of four main regions; Kowloon, the New Territories (both making up the peninsular mainland part of Hong Kong), Hong Kong Island (the real heart of the city), and the Outlying Islands. There are literally hundreds of outlying islands, but Lantau (where Disneyland, Po Lin, and the airport is), Lamma, and Cheung Chau in the South China Sea are the biggest and most populated. That day I decided to visit Cheung Chau, the smallest of the three. I got a ticket for the high speed ferry, and it took about half an hour to get to the island.
Cheung Chau Island couldn't be more different from the "big island'. It's a sleepy little resort village where the only motorized vehicles are for emergency services, and people mostly spend their days walking along the quiet, narrow streets sampling the food from the open-air restaurants and snack stands.
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| Cheung Chau's wet market |
I walked along the quiet streets for a while, and enjoyed the view of the boats floating in the harbor. I briefly stopped by a small, old temple where the locals pray for calm seas. Despite the wealth and industry of modern Hong Kong, it still remains much of its seafaring culture.
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| boats in Cheung Chau harbor |
I spent several hours on the island, and after a fresh seafood lunch took the boat back to Hong Kong Island.
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| Cheung Chau Village |
That evening I was to meet up with two other good friends and Hong Kong locals, Hincent and Joanna who studied with me at Stellenbosch University two years ago. Joanna picked me up at my hotel and we took the subway downtown to meet Hincent. They took me out for dinner, and we caught up over Hong Kong fried oysters. After eating we walked along Temple Street, a night market famous for its street performers and cheap goods.
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| delicious dinner |
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| a guy balancing stuff on Temple Street |
After walking around for a while my friends took me to a dessert cafe. I would eat a lot in Hong Kong. Dessert consisted of three dishes; mango roll things, milk cream stuff, and pink grape ice cream. Yeah, I don't really know exactly what everything was called! It all looks delicious, as you can see.
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| and dessert! |
It tasted great too! You know that artificial grape flavor, like what grape candy tastes like? It doesn't taste like grapes, right? Well, it turns out that the flavor comes from a special type of really sweet Japanese grape. The ice cream that we had was that flavor! Dessert also came with a small side of red beans. Red beans are a popular dessert food in Thailand as well. They aren't anything like the beans back home, they're actually really sweet. Red beans and (sticky) rice is a popular dessert here, and it couldn't be further from the Louisiana dish.
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