You Koreazy!: Adventures in Hong Kong, and in my belly.

Happy New Year!

For the Christmas part of the festive season, I journeyed to Hong Kong to visit the lovely Perdy, a friend from university who I hadn't seen for two years previous. The journey there was long and not fun. The meals on the plane were fine except for a mysterious article which I suspected was cat food. It was jelly, in a tin shape, with bits of meat in it. Of course I tried it. This was setting me up for a week of new culinary experiences, which you will read about soon enough unless your computer decides to install updates or you get bored. Anyway, it was cat food in taste as well as appearance. In conclusion, it was cat food.

Over the next four days, I travelled by:

Foot
Car
Cable Car
Speedboat
Ferry
Bus
Train
Subway
Mini-bus

Hong Kong was overtaken by 'Hong Kong WinterFest', a city wide decoration festival and they were really creative in ways to make your average Christmas tree unusual and interesting:

Christmas Day

On Christmas day, Perdy and I met up with her mom for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. We (me) ate A LOT at this dinner, and everything except a fish stomach was delicious.

Alice, Perdy and I.

This is called a century egg, because it's been encased in clay which makes the egg more alkaline and it goes black, green and blue and solid without having to even cook it, after weeks to potentially months of sitting waiting in its clay home. This was one thing I REALLY wanted to try on my trip, and coming in a pork rice porridge soup, it was tasty and something I'm glad I tried. I'm not sure how many of you will be convinced. It's like you don't want to eat old eggs!

Another course in our feast was chicken feet. There's an interesting and quite invasive method of eating these. The trick is to suck the meat off the knuckles until you break them off, and then move onto the next knuckle down. Not much meat on them (look at your own fingers, about that much) but they were tasty!

Cake a la Hong Kong.

Some tasty beefy balls.

Some tasty porky balls. The pork was similar to that which you get in a pork pie.

Afterwards, me and Perdy wandered round the markets, a railway museum and then went to meet her friend Blueky at his family's Hong Kong Style barbecue. See below:

Afterwards, we drank wine and played a board game (Mahjong... better described as a game on a board). This combined with the ritual stuffing of myself with lots of food actually gave way to a traditional style Christmas, just on the other side of the world.

Miscellaneous Food

On display here is beancurd 'sauce' (chinese cheese) covered green beans, deep fried oyster and pork in rice in a hot stone bowl, making the rice nice'n'crispy. Following this we ate snake soup.

This was my final meal in Hong Kong: Breakfast. It included French toast, noodles with sauteed beef, pineapple bun with butter (not cheese, although it looks like it in the picture) a sausage keeping warm under a lovely ham blanket, egg and a piping hot cuppa tea.

And so, after my culinary journey of Hong Kong, it was time to say goodbye.

Goodbye.

Photo Challenge

Moving onto more festivities, a few friends and I spent New Years Eve celebrating in Seoul. It was fun. I stumbled across a photo challenge on fatmumslim.com.au for the new year. Each day, I will take a photo, as according to the list:

I'll be uploading my photos here (hopefully daily) so keep on checking back.

Day 1: Me

This was very early in the morning of January 2nd, so I'm already not doing it to the rules, but it was at this time I found out about the challenge. You can see my little froggy friend in the background.