Austinite Eats Asia

Austin: Wow, It has been a while.

2010-12-30T15:02:00.002+08:00

Hello world,

If you are still following me it is probably because you don't get online often enough to realize that I never post anything on this blog! Or maybe it is because you know me in real life and you keep hoping that I haven't totally disappeared off the face of the Earth. Well perhaps your persistence has paid off. I don't know what this blog post should really accomplish.

Should I try and summarize neatly everything that has happened in 2010?

No, I think not.

Tomorrow is my last real day in Austin. My schedule is: work out, Mandarin tutoring, pick up the tuxedo in which I am to be a best man, doctor, Mandarin tutoring and then something yet to be determined to occupy my evening. After tomorrow my time will all be a blur filled with wedding activities, packing to return to Taipei, New Year's Eve, seeing the few friends that I haven't been able to see yet, etc.

Returning to the states has been a nice reminder of life outside of my little bubble I have made for myself in Taipei. My bubble has been providing me with a great opportunity to stay healthy, learn Mandarin and really enjoy myself, but it is amazing how quickly one forgets what it is like to live at home!

When I arrived in the Dallas airport from Tokyo I was completely overwhelmed by the varieties of Americans present. Particularly by the ever-present obesity, Texan accents and the enormous Dallas haircuts. I immediately sought out the group of Asiatic looking people I saw sitting awaiting the flight to Austin but was disappointed to hear them speaking Vietnamese (while still gloating that I am now capable to discerning the distinctions between major Asiatic languages.)

Transitioning to life in America took a good week and a half or two. Partially from jet lag and partially from being dropped into the chaos of the holiday season. As soon as I had adjusted, I was able to really enjoy my time here and take full of advantage of being home! Austin is just too amazing of a city! I find it so easy to fill every waking moment here with some amazing new activity or by seeing some family member or friend! This is also what makes me so adamant about going away to study! Less distractions! I am eternally grateful that I can call Austin home, all the people who are part of my life in Austin are beyond amazing! It is not easy to leave this city! Even for a temporary trip! But that is a good quality for one's home to have.

Hmm, I am sure that if I allowed myself to indulge, I could write here all night. But there is quite a bit on my plate. If I'm not ready to go to sleep I should be studying! or preparing for my return! or thinking about what I am going to say at the wedding rehearsal! You get the picture. Always far far too much to do. But I ask to stay busy, and I make my life such. Life is full of opportunities too good to pass by and if I had but more time or more hands I would be far more busy than I am now.

Taipei: Raw Liquid Diet: First 24 Hours

2010-07-08T13:13:00.005+08:00

I have been wanting do to a liquid only diet for a while now for a few reasons:

1) Look at the rest of my blog and you will know that I have been way over indulgent with my diet while in Asia.

2) The greens and fruits here are cheap, delicious and come in such variety.

3) The weather is oppressively hot which makes me neither want to consume hot foods nor to expend any excess energy digesting foods than is absolutely necessary.

4) I recently had my first sinus troubles (first any sort of health trouble) since I started my last raw food diet, leading me to believe the coffers of bodily health and happiness I was able to accumulate so much merit for while living in Austin are now finally running dry.

5) To prove to myself that I can do it.

6) Because there aren't any good reasons not to.

(meal one) - So last night I drank 1/4 of a taiwanese watermelon. Watermelons here are enormous and delicious, ill take photos next time to show you what I am talking about. Drinking so much juice was perhaps a bit overkill but I wanted to start it off with a big alkaline bang. Recently mosquitoes have been landing on me more often. I still don't think I have been bitten but I worry that the fact that they land on me at all speaks poorly of my ph level. Don't worry, liquid raw food diet also doesn't mean that I will be on a fruit only diet. The watermelon was a nice means of transitioning from the veggie diet I had been living. Recently I have been over-indulging in vegan fried rice and 炒米粉 (Chǎo mǐfěn - fried rice noodles).

(meal two) - I have a tendency to over-indulge in banana and leafy green smoothies. They are so easy, cheap and delicious. So I simply allowed myself to default to this smoothie, I threw in some Goji Berries which I just bought as well (so cheap! the bag pictured cost about 4 dollars US) I unfortunately have run out of martenelli's apple juice as my roommate and friends all were able to appreciate its splendor as much as I was, and found myself without any other fun liquid to add to my smoothie so was forced to use some water. Luckily with the vitamix you don't have to add much before it will start doing it's thing. I finished cleaning just in time for the 1 o'clock trash truck so I ran out my food waste just in time for them to dump it into the compost can and take it off to one of the city composts. Trash here comes twice a day, sounds like an ice cream truck and will take anything compostable or recyclable from you for free! It is pretty great.

Taipei: So Many Nutrients!

2010-06-13T12:09:00.004+08:00

This is what you get when you combine an entire container of salad mix, 4 oz. of Martinelli's Apple Juice and 2 over-ripe bananas! This is the watery bit left at the bottom, the part already consumed was solid enough to mold to the contours of the cup and could be picked up with chopsticks. It taste's delicious but looks like baby poop. There was nothing particularly pleasing about the experience of eating it... but so many nutrients!

Next time fewer greens and more liquid.

Taipei: My Patience Rewarded!

2010-06-09T00:55:00.008+08:00

One of the reasons I came to Taiwan to begin with was because of my love of tea and my knowledge that Taiwan is to tea-lovers what Amsterdam is to pot-heads. The last thing I wanted however was to walk into a tea shop and be mistaken for a tourist looking for a novelty tea set to pay way too much for in order to have something to put on a shelf and never use. So I waited. Wait for my Chinese to improve was my intention, and that has happened, but on top of that, my path just happened to cross ways with other people who love tea as much as I do and who have so much to teach me and genuine interest in my American Gung-Fu Cha experiences. I have developed my relationship with them and steeped enough pots of tea from tea sets available in local tea houses with them that I finally decided to have a set of my own, and that my friend decided to help me assemble it. I am in hog heaven. I love Taiwan.

Taipei: How is it already June?

2010-06-05T14:24:00.004+08:00

Time flies by so quickly here. I am still dealing with the issues of eating meat. Making compromises is an interesting aspect of human nature. Being faced with the reality that I wasn't willing to insist on not eating meat in situations where it would be inconvenient for my friends, I instead just invented new rules to veganism, constructed situations where it would be ok to cheat on myself. Now I never eat meat if I am alone, but only with certain friends who have to eat meat with every meal. Certain other friends have joined with me in avoiding meat, some have embraced it even more whole-heartedly than I. The world is a magical place.

I am now in an 8:30 am chinese class with three japanese people, another american and a guy from somewhere in Europe. Changing from the 3:00 pm class to the 8:30 am class is a large life change but it is one that I requested and am glad to be making. My schedule revolves in large part around, sleeping, studying and eating leafy green vegetables. If I were to stumble upon a genie in a bottle, I don't think I would have anything to wish for.

I went with my friends to Kaohsiung last Sunday because they were playing a show there. About an hour before they were to go on they realized that they didn't have anybody to man there table and sell cd's for them. I didn't volunteer, thinking my language barrier to be a bar from eligibility, but they didn't see it that way and asked me to sell cd's for them. So I did.

Introspective: eating meat

2010-05-02T23:34:00.004+08:00

In my mind, the fact that I am eating meat is not something that I am proud of. I view it in the same light that one might view drinking alcohol, smoking tobacco, or indulging in any number of activities that we seek out in order to pleasure ourselves. I ask myself "why do I eat meat?" and have only two answers.

It is often delicious and thus brings me pleasure.

It is socially easier to eat meat than to not eat meat. By eating meat I avoid distancing myself from others, avoiding causing both myself and others discomfort.

Searching my mind to see if there was ever any other reason to eat meat I realized that occasionally I think that I am ordering a dish that does not contain meat and instead am served a dish with meat in it. Rather than paying for a new dish, causing a fuss about the dish served or abstaining from the meal; I often will simply eat the dish with meat. Even beyond that I will often enjoy and relish the dish, cleaning the plate and sitting in a position of false contentment, thinking to myself "I wanted to avoid meat but forces beyond my control put this meat onto my plate and into my body." Thus I am able to indulge in a pleasurable experience without causing myself nor my immediate others any form of distress.

I seriously believe eating meat to be harmful to myself and to the environment. I have never seen a compelling moral reason which justifies killing an animal in order to bring myself pleasure.

All I can be is an educated consumer. When I ate shrimp fried rice tonight I knew for a fact that Shrimp trawling is one of the most destructing fishing activities imaginable. An activity responsible for millions of tons of dead fish being dumped into the ocean. An activity which results in the indiscriminate destruction of coral reefs, endangered species and ocean ecosystems. I also knew for a fact that the eggs in my dish were most likely from a factory chicken farm where thousands if not tens of thousands of genetically engineered and selectively bred layer hens were living their lives out beak-less and unable even to turn around in their cage. Beyond that I knew that by eating eggs I was engaging in an activity which would bring me pleasure immediately, but a significant amount of pain later given the fact that my body refuses to process egg and instead responds by doing something very much like flushing my entire digestive tract in order to purge itself of this unwanted guest.

Eating from animals shames me.

Writing this blog post will cause discomfort to others in the same way that saying "I am sorry, I don't want to share in your Thanksgiving turkey with you because I don't eat animals" causes discomfort, but because I don't have to look any of you in the face while I am saying all of this I am more comfortable doing so.

Am I going to go back to vegetarianism? Since I can't digest eggs or dairy anyway... to veganism?

I don't know.

Just know that every bite of meat I take and have taken at any meal photographed for this blog is either for a purely visceral pleasure or to avoid taking a stand for what I believe in.

Taipei: Photoshop Expired

2010-04-25T12:02:00.003+08:00

So my trial of photoshop expired and Photoshop CS5 is coming out mid May so I am in a period where I can't satisfactorily edit my photos for blog posting, but it is corresponding to my moving into a three story house-like-space, and when you rent an empty space in taiwan, it is not uncommon for things like lights and hot water heaters to be among the things not provided. So between my house, studying, enjoying Taipei and seeing friends, I am finding myself with very little down time. I am really missing Eeyore's Birthday today though, Austin is never far from my heart and thoughts.

Taipei: Voraciously Omnivorous

2010-04-01T19:47:00.007+08:00

Tofu from Fu-Mon-Tang Pork Restaurant

Pork from Fu-Mon-Tang Pork Restaurant

Pig Face from Street Market near Yongchun MRT Station

Slow Cooked Pork from Hakka Restaurant on SongDe

Tofu from Hakka Restaurant on SongDe

Greens from Hakka Restaurant on SongDe

Eggplant from Hakka Restaurant on SongDe

Chicken Feet from Street Market near Yongchun MRT Station

Pig Foot from Restaurant near Guting Station

Chicken Leg from Restaurant near Guting Station

So every time I walk to the MRT station I have (get) to walk past at least fifteen amazing looking restaurants and street vendors. Up until this week I had only tried three of them for fear of butchering the Chinese language (中文) and for love of being a regular customer. But now I have eaten (and photographed) at a few more places and let me tell you, they know how to cook in this neighborhood.

Now that I have reached the ripe old age of twenty-two I am really starting to feel my age... or maybe I am just starting to feel the excess of fried street food, wheat and animal fat that I have been consuming for the past two months. I have turned to cycling to try to counter the effects of being as omnivorous as possible, which has been a great way to get around Taipei as well as being a great use of my free time. Cycling is having the unfortunate side effects of forcing me to do laundry far more often and of forcing me to breathe in excessive amounts of exhaust fumes. I assure you that the satisfaction I glean from racing against scooters is more than enough to outweigh these oh-so-slight negatives. I honestly feel safer weaving around scooters, taxis, busses and Taiwanese people that I do riding my bicycle in Texas though. People on the street here are ever-vigilant, predictably aggressive and reassuringly competent, there are no grandparents who stopped being able to see street signs twenty years ago nor cell phone wielding land cruiser driving upper middle class mothers with 2.5 children in tow.

While on the topic of the elderly, I have met two 80-90 year old men here who have spoken amazing english, been vegetarian and worked for some division of the Military in Taiwan for the majority of their lives. Both of them were more in love with Americans that any American I know and were both still working and in good enough health to not need any assistance to make their own way around the city. Both of them were very excited to talk to me and were excited that I was in Taiwan. Every day is a new adventure.

I now have a Tumblr account which I will probably be throwing random pieces of media up on far more often that I update this blog. So for those of you who use my blog as a way to know that I am still alive, the Tumblr might be a better way to check my pulse.

At some point in the distant future this blog will hopefully again be full of pictures and facts of the foods of Asia on a more regular basis but while I am in this place in my life which consists of pointing at food and saying 我要買這個 or of merely checking boxes on menus in an intelligently anarchic fashion, I am afraid that I won't even be able to supply the proper names of these dishes.

Taipei: Vegetable!

2010-03-21T16:02:00.004+08:00

I now eat deep fried cauliflower on an almost daily basis. So beautiful and so delicious. I miss Casa de Luz so much. I have intense cravings for macrobiotic food... vegan food... raw food. I do actually eat a good deal of vegetables, most of my meals here have much smaller portions of meat than most Americans would be accustomed to, even when compared to chinese food in the states. Chinese style vegetables are delicious and often include cooked leafy greens, which I have a particular affinity for and yet generally can only find as part of a salad in the states. So far my apartment has been a raw-vegan space and I have aspirations of keeping my living / cooking space thus designated when I find a new apartment that actually has enough room in it to prepare food.

Taipei: My Fixed Gear vs. Crazy Taiwanese Scooter

2010-03-15T20:01:00.007+08:00

So I was biking to school today and one of the many crazy Taiwanese scooter drivers decided to turn my ride into something more than a commute by bringing my heart rate to a level befitting a healthy cardio session. His method of doing so was to go from his location behind me and to my left side to around the front of me in order to turn right onto another street. This would have been fine had he not also decided to test my reflexes by aiming his scooter at the side of my front tire. I surprised myself by having sufficient agility to leap off my bike and onto my feet while directing my bike away from the impact so that the only evidence of any collision whatsoever is this light rubber skid mark going across my wheel.

Delicious deep fried street food is one of the few available late night options near my mrt stop.

I have become a regular at both of these place. I seriously wake up with intense cravings of these hollow tube tofu things with wrinkly outsides. I think it is a member of the tofu kingdom but I have no idea what it is called.

Taipei: Clay Pot Teaser

2010-03-10T21:28:00.004+08:00

So I am currently searching for a new apartment and a fixed gear bicycle. I want those two things in that order but I have been more successful at finding the later. Self-restraint held out however and I walked away from the store a few stickers richer and having left nothing behind but the promise of my return. I will actually probably go back tomorrow because there is a ride happening on friday night that I want to participate in before leaving for the Megaport festival in Kaoshiung on Saturday morning. But anyway, I took the bus one stop too far on my way to BREAKBRAKE 17 and this ended up being extremely fortuitous because I found the most delicious smelling clay pot restaurant I have ever... smelled? The restaurant is evidently only open during the winter and is extremely popular. I am currently trying to rally some troops to return here and eat!

Fortune favors those who eat ripe bananas! Half off to buy them ready to eat!

Taipei: table for twenty, the meal my camera slept through

2010-03-08T20:13:00.007+08:00

So most of my food experiences in Taiwan have happened while my camera was elsewhere, however the dinner below is special because I had my camera with me, but it had decided to take a siesta all day, refusing to take any pictures. After dinner I tried to turn my camera back on and was surprised to find it taking photos again, so I took a few pictures of the table mostly so that I would remember the epic meal that my camera missed. I love that when you show up to a restaurant at 1am here and say "table for twenty" the restaurant is excited to be able to seat you, at home I can hardly imagine the baleful glares that we would receive or the ire with which our food would be served. It does help that most restaurants here seem to be run by their owner and that food here is shared so that dishes can come out when they are ready, rather than all 20 at once.

Food that is cooked in front of you is fun. Especially when it costs less than 3 usd.

Taiwan: Some things about Taipei

2010-03-04T01:03:00.008+08:00

Taipei 101 during the Lighting Fesitval

Taipei 101 can be seen standing tall over all the other buildings in Taipei

Lanterns near Taipei City Hall during the Lighting Festival

So Taipei is beautiful, in case you didn't notice from the pictures I just posted. I was talking to my Mandarin teacher about how I love Taipei and I mentioned how I am a big fan of the architecture here. She said to me that many people she had talked to had said to her something along the lines of "I really like Taipei, but the architecture here... eh..." I constantly strive to see beauty in everything and I rarely fail to be able to do so. I am taking classes at Tai-Da which was built by the Japanese while they occupied Taiwan. The entire campus is breathtakingly beautiful and, despite the hostility that any nation has for a foreign nation which decides to invade and occupy it, the Japanese aesthetic has been maintained and cared for since the campus was built. The palm-tree lined streets and red brick buildings of Tai-Da contrast sharply with most of the city which ranges from utilitarian apartment complexes to the bamboo-inspired Taipei 101.

Tripe, Knife Cut Noodles, Green Onion and Shaved Ginger

So I can't figure out why but I just can't get into ginger... I know! I eat snake, snails, organ meat, stinky tofu... you name it and I love it... but ginger... I know its good for you! It just doesn't work any sort of magic over my taste buds. None whatsoever. Its a shame really because the dish pictured above is just one of a slew of similar dishes I have had here with a liberal application of shaved ginger. I mean I still enjoy all of the dishes, if its food and in front of me I generally can't complain.

Stinky Tofu

So I'm starting to get stinky tofu. Maybe. I mean I like it better in Taiwan anyways. I don't know. I'll keep eating it until I figure out why I should go out of my way to get it instead of the million other types of tofu available here.

Thin Beef with Green Onion in Sweet Sesame Wheat Wrap

So... it's sweet... and cold... didn't really expect either of those. I'm definitely not complaining though because it was delicious.

Grape Jelly

The bottled beverages here are awesome. I totally thought I was buying grape juice and then I opened the bottle to find a super thick fluid that wouldn't even begin to flow out from the bottle. The viscosity of this fluid having temporarily stymied my attempt to quench my thirst, I stuck the bottle in my backpack and set back to my room to conquer this new substance. I have since found a plethora of jelly substances for sale in the 7-11s, family marts and O.K. convenient stores. A Taiwanese friend clued me in to the fact that the proper method to drink these beverages is with a straw, so I am now able to imbibe jelly drinks while walking around town.

niu ro xian bing - Beef Bun

Those of you who have ever eaten a sausage wrap are likely to have experienced the sensation of biting into a flour-wrapped-meat product only to be rewarded with the discovery that the meat inside is really just a host for projectile molten grease napalm (MGN). I stained many pairs of pants and many a shirt while in high school by attempting to consume sausage wraps from Rosie's to-go while driving only to repeatedly fall victim to MGN attacks. Both I and my Canadian friend Josh have fallen victim to MGN attacks while consuming niu ro xian bing here in Taipei. There is a surefire way to disarm the MGN trap however, which requires nothing more than puncturing the flour-wrapped-meat product with a fork or chopstick; or simply the resolve to break whatever flour-wrapped-meat product you are about to consume in half before biting into it. I know that flour-wrapped-meat products always look so delicious and inviting and that it is easy to forget the danger of the almost guaranteed MGN trap lurking inside, but only through constant vigilance can we be safe from MGN attacks.

Street Vendor

This is one of many street stands in Taipei where one may order food by grabbing a basket and tongs from atop the stand and then using the tongs to select the food which you want to consume and placing each item into the provided basket. You then hand the basket over to the chef who cooks your food and then hands you a delicious plate of food cooked to order. I have become a regular at one of these places that stays open until past midnight right outside of the Yongchun MRT station. Without needing to speak at all I can eat exactly what I want to eat, its amazing. I already get the feeling that I will miss this style of street food when I leave Taiwan in the hopefully distant future.

Taiwan: Huaxi Street

2010-03-03T01:33:00.004+08:00

So my first night in Taipei I went to Longshan Temple with a Japanese and a Taiwanese friend. Longshan Temple is really beautiful, I don't have any pictures of it at the moment but I will probably go take some and then post about it again or something. The point of this post is not the awesome temple nor the really moving ceremony that was going on there as part of the Lunar New Year but is my going to Huaxi Street afterwards, also called snake street.

I looked for a link to post about Huaxi street and, humorously, when I google it, I get results for Snake Wine, which is what I imbibed on my first night here and what this post is really about.

Snake Wine on Huaxi Street

The red cup is a sorghum wine mixed with the blood of a cobra, the amber one to the left of it is cobra venom mixed with sorghum wine and the opaque white is cobra bile mixed with sorghum wine. The three on the left were different shots that I didn't quite understand the ingredients of. One involved traditional chinese medicinal herbs. The alcohol denatures the snake venom rendering it harmless. All of these shots were very sweet in the way that sorghum alcohol generally is. I really walked away from this experience without any particularly strong reaction, there was definitely a strange physical sensation that I hadn't ever experienced from alcohol before. Kind of like a tingling verging on feeling like my body was falling asleep but not so intense as that.

Snake Soup

Cross-Section of Snake Meat

Snake meat is really bony. It was way more work to eat than really anything else I can immediately think of, and the meat itself was really bland. The broth was very clean and robust which led me to think that it was more of a snake broth with some meat in there to prove that snakes were involved than anything else.

Prawns Roasted Alive on Huaxi Street

So these prawns were roasted alive, I also posted a video I took with my iPhone. They were also a lot of work to eat really. But they were good in a so fresh that I just saw them swimming and then wriggling around while roasting before I consumed them kind of way. I bet you all think I have gone insane... I haven't consumed insects yet... but that is only because I haven't found any to consume. Can anyone think of something else for me to eat or drink? I am running out of ideas for weird things.

Taiwan: Pingshi Sky Lantern Festival

2010-03-01T13:33:00.006+08:00

So I've been in Taiwan for about a week and a half now, sorry to just now be posting my first blog about it but I arrived in Taiwan as a student trying to find lodging, friends and to figure out a new city where english is less than common rather than arriving in Hong Kong as a food tourist with a friend who speaks both Cantonese and Mandarin in a city that mostly speaks english. I'll slowly give some backstory to my past week and a half in the posts to follow this one.

Last night a few friends and I went to Pingshi to witness the Sky Lantern Festival. We travelled there by train despite the warnings not to do so due to overcrowding. I don't have a picture of how crowded the train was because there was no room for me to get out my camera. I am pretty sure that I was smaller when I got off the train than when I got onto it, I've never been so tightly compressed. This picture is a small sample of the people who poured off the train with us, it doesn't even begin to depict the massive crowd of people in Pingshi.

After wandering around a bit we stumbled upon a family who was sending off a lantern, after watching them complete the process they invited us to do likewise. They showed us what to do and gave us all the supplies, this is our lantern taking off.

This was meant to be a photo showing how densely crowded the festival which it does even better accompanied by my reassurance that this photo better serves to example a break in the crowd than it does to example how crowded this town was, we had absolutely no personal space for the next five hours after this photo was taken.

Night shooting, a jostly crowd and a lack of a tripod led to this blurry photo depicting a lantern with fireworks attached to the bottom. The small red dots in the background were other lanterns.

A Lantern released at the Pingshi Sky Lantern Festival. The tradition is to write your hopes for the new year on the lantern. The things which they told us to write were the exact kind of things which I hear many Christians say that they pray for.

another picture of the crowd in Pingshi

Another lantern with fireworks attached.

They released massive numbers of lanterns as a group every thirty minutes or so.

This is as close to the field where the mass release happens before we gave up getting any closer, it was a good decision because it took us over three hours to get from here onto a bus to Taipei.

A couple releasing their lantern. The method is to hold the paper open for long enough for the fire to start to bring it aloft, you can see here how they have just stopped holding it back.

Some lanterns got stuck in trees.

Others in power lines.

We finally made it onto a bus home. I don't think I had ever been so glad to sit down.

Hong Kong: Temple St. Night Market Street Food

2010-02-25T14:12:00.004+08:00

Street Food Stand on Temple St. Night Market

Stinky Tofu. Literally smells like poo but tastes just like tofu. I don't see the big deal.

Snails!

Pork Stomach

Assorted Pork Organs

Deep Fried Oyster Pancake

Organ Meats, Meat Balls and other Street Fare

Mantis Shrimp

Fried Squid

Egg Carton Waffle

Hong Kong: Sham Shui Po - Dim Sum

2010-02-25T13:56:00.002+08:00

Our Delicious dim sum experience after taking pictures of the market in Sham Shui Po. We sat at a table with 5 old Chinese men who ate there everyday. It reminded me of the Chinese version of the Mecca Cafe in Dallas where my Grandfather used to go every morning. It had the same feel as Mecca and the patrons obviously had a relationship with the servers. Its a small world. Part of the Lunar New Year tradition includes gifts of money in sealed red envelopes to family and friends. All of the men had envelopes for the wait staff. It was a very cool thing to see.

New Year Meatballs with Dried Oyster and Hair Fungus

Pork Meatballs with Pork Stomach on top

Shrimp Dumplings

Meatballs and Squash

Fishballs

Meatballs with Tofu Skin

Chinese Pigs in a Blanket

Glutinous Rice in a Bun

Hong Kong: Sham Shui Po - Market

2010-02-25T13:19:00.003+08:00

I promised you pictures of the market at Sham Shui Po and here they are! Long overdue!

Sea Cucumber

Meat Aisle

Box of Frogs

Turtle

Trotters

Tripe

Eel

Fish and Swim Bladders

Veggie Aisle

Apples that are serious about their packaging

Root veggies and Squash

Star Fruit

Cherries

Citrus

Hong Kong: Late Night Congee Shop

2010-02-25T13:15:00.003+08:00

Hungry at 4 AM and in Causeway Bay? Luckily there is an amazing little congee shop on Jardine's Bazaar where we got all of these treats.

Turnip Cake

Dried Shrimp in Rice Wrap

Beef in Rice Paper Wrap

Congee with Pork Intestine

Congee with Egg

Hong Kong: Food Courts are Awesome

2010-02-25T13:05:00.002+08:00

So we came to Hong Kong thinking that all food court food was horrible. This is not true in Asia. Food Courts are awesome. Here is a sampling of one from Hong Kong. Soon I will start posting about a food court right next to my apartment in Taipei

Korean Bean-Thread Noodles with Kim-Chee and Beef

Wontons, Dumplings and Soup with Fishballs and Seaweed

Japanese Octopus Balls

Japanese Meat Pancake

Hong Kong: Sugar Street

2010-02-25T12:39:00.005+08:00

So there is a small street right next to Victoria Park in Causeway Bay that has 3-4 delicious cheap noodle stores. When we wanted a light lunch we started saying "let's just go to Sugar Street." Here are some of the dishes we got either on Sugar Street or just nearby but that stay true to what Sugar Street food means to me.

Tripe and Ground Flat Fish

Shrimp Ball and Noodle

Octopus Ball and Noodles

Noodles with Pork Ribs and XO Sauce

Noodles with Trotters

White fish and Noodles

Dumplings, Wontons and Noodles

Noodles and Beef Tendon

Hong Kong: Desserts

2010-02-25T12:20:00.004+08:00

I can identify Dried Longan Berries, Barley and Lotus Nuts

Papaya

Tapioca balls and mango

Red Dates and Lotus Nuts

Coconut Milk, Lotus Nuts and Tapioca Balls

White Fungus, Papaya

These were all delicious, some served hot, some cold. There are restaurants along the street that sell these exclusively. We got in the habit of walking to this place after each dinner for something light, refreshing and delicious. Very small and not too sweet. Neither So-Han nor I normally go for desserts so it says something that we were so adamant about getting these nightly.

Hong Kong: Failed attempt to get Poon Choi

2010-02-23T22:59:00.005+08:00

So I feel inclined to describe what poon choi is here but we live in the digital age so instead I will give you the link to the wikipedia page which I would be copy pasting otherwise. If you don't want to click the link, you are lazy... but I will cave and just tell you that poon choi is essentially a big bowl full of delicious food that is commonly served at holidays. Think of it like the entire thanksgiving feast in one big bowl. Well, So-Han and I tried to order this feast in a bowl at Tai Hing, the waiter looked at us like we were crazy, as did the family we were sharing a very small table with, but we insisted. nodding vigorously. The waiter left, came back, and told us that we could not order it. Defeat.

Our new year was poon choi-less.

Thats not to say we didn't eat some delicious food at Tai Hing anyway!

We tried to keep in the poon choi spirit by ordering a plate full of different things.

The BBQ Pork here is delicious

I think the way they roast pork is so beautiful. The crisp skin is so delicious.

We missed the lunar new year fireworks because it took us so long to order this meal.

Hong Kong: Hakka Cuisine Again!

2010-02-15T21:07:00.004+08:00

So we have totally destroyed the no repeats rule a few times over... Maybe next time I would switch hotels every week... But honestly, it really seems a shame to only try a handful of the menu offerings at these restaurants. With this in mind, and the determination to at least not order the same dish twice, we returned to Chuen Cheurng Kui, the aforementioned Hakka Restaurant. This was to be our Lunar New Years meal and we had high hopes for eating squid-balls, dried oysters, hair fungus, wontons and suckling pig. We succeeded at finding and consuming most of these items over the 14th and 15th.

Haaka Eight Treasure - 8 Treasure Duck - 八寶鴨 - Bat Bao Ya - Bat Bao Aap

Eight Treasure Duck was absolutely phenomenal and I'm not sure that the pictures do it justice. I can't recount the eight treasures for you but I can relate that this dish included Sea Cucumber, Pork, Duck, Goose Intestine, Gai lan, Green Onions and Ginger. That's only seven and we really aren't sure which of those really count as treasures. Regardless, this dish has now defined for us a very high standard to which we can now hold all sea cucumber dishes, included the best goose intestine I've ever eaten (I eat a lot of intestine) and every other element was phenomenal as well. We didn't leave even a bite.

Deep Fried Pork Intestine - zhà zhū dà cháng - 炸豬大腸

Didn't I tell you that I eat a lot of intestine? This menu item really ordered itself, I just knew it had to be on our table. I'm not sure if it is normally associated with the Lunar New Year but it certainly seems like an auspicious dish. Red is a particularly auspicious color and is as associated with the Chinese New Year as it is associated with Christmas, if not more so. One element of the Chinese New Year is that people should buy new red underwear and wear it on the first of the new Lunar Year (presuming that the local Cantonese people telling us these things aren't just playing games on the gullible Americans.) I've never worn red underwear on Christmas despite red being a Christmas color. Anyways, this dish was masterful. The intestine was perfectly crisp and airy. Often times pork intestine is fried into an extremely dense form, seemingly collapsing the interior lining of the intestine into the crisp outside so that the dish eats more like a normal meat. The interior of this intestine almost felt like a soft crouton or Chicharrón, something firm but airy that crunches and then dissolves with a buttery - rich - fat sensation that is oh so satisfying and delicious.

Suckling Pig - 燒乳豬 - shāo rǔ zhū - Siu Yu Jü

Having been awed by suckling pig and by this restaurant on two separate occasions, we decided to see what would happen if we combined the two. This was an amazing idea and netted us a delicious dish that also happened to be an auspicious way to bring in the new lunar year. Suckling pig seems to be uniformly so tender and tasty. Every bite of this dish literally melted in your mouth. If you haven't tried suckling pig, you need to. Now.

Big Eel and Roast Pork Hot Pot - 大鳗烤猪肉锅 - dà mán kǎo zhū ròu guō

You might have read my commentary about clay pots in the Sham Shui Po post, well it goes triple for this dish. I don't understand how food can taste this good. It is mind boggling. I have eaten like a king in the US. I have eaten gourmet in some of the best rated restaurants in the US and I make a hobby out of finding the best food I can find anywhere I go. Every bite of this dish was a food-gasm. The pork was some of the most tender and delicious of my life. The eel was crispy while maintaining it's unique texture and taste. Even the chunks of ginger and garlic in this dish were edible and delicious. This is definitely the best clay pot of my life and the pork and eel will live on in my memory as some of the most delicious meats that have ever graced my tongue with their glorious presence.

Focus: Beef Tongue

2010-02-15T16:09:00.003+08:00

Entire Beef Tongue in a Paris Supermarket

Beef Tongue with Curry in Hong Kong

Most of the times I have eaten tongue in my life it has been in the same shape as pictured in this Curry dish. I always wondered just what exactly the entire cow tongue looked like, whether all the tongue in the world came from veal cows and was just really small (because to me, the way the tongue is cut makes the slice of tongue still resemble what I thought an entire tongue would look like.) Luckily for me, I thoroughly explored all the meat sections of the supermarket in Paris and found a stack of entire cow tongues for sale! I really wanted to buy one to experiment with but I really wasn't staying in a place where I could sufficiently access the potential of an enormous cow tongue. Now that I have seen the entire cow tongue, however, I have come to the conclusion that the slices of tongue I had always thought were tongues unto themselves seem to be vertical slices of tongue.

My favorite tongue dish is still undoubtedly tongue tacos (tacos de lingua) in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. That being said, I am very young and with any luck there will be many tongues from many culinary traditions in my future.

Hong Kong: Shanghainese Food

2010-02-14T01:11:00.006+08:00

So we have had a few experiences with Shangheinese food while in Hong Kong and we finally found a place worth blogging about! The following pictures were taken at a place called Delicious Kitchen located in Causeway Bay. Delicious Kitchen is right next to an outlet mall, a particularly tourist oriented row of restaurants and one of the major shopping streets in Hong Kong, but the restaurant hides itself at the end of a street, furthest from the busy commerce and does not post it's name in english. I happened to stroll by it on the last day of the pre-lunar year sales and was immediately stricken by both the amazingly strong and tantalizing aroma and that it had a line of people outside in the rain waiting to be seated. I made a mental note and went back to the hotel to see if So-Han had returned from re-uniting with his family. He had and we were both ready for food so out we went, luckily finding the lunch rush to be at its end.

Smoked Fish with Rice and Preserved Vegetables

So-Han had luckily been a bit more observant than I at our previous Shanghainese restaurant excursions and had noticed that the above dish had stood out to him on each menu. We correctly decided that this boded well and decided, to both of our delight, to try the dish. Shanghainese food uses more sugar than most other Chinese cuisine styles and this element is very striking both visibly and gustatorily. Smoking fish seems to be a generally extremely win idea, and when combined with this delicious marinade it made for an extremely tender dish with a deliciously crisp and full flavor.

Nian Gao with Assorted Meats

Nian Gao in this style is uniquely Shanghainese and is also associated with the Chinese New Year so we had a few reasons to try it and were very well rewarded by doing so. The Shanghainese style of Nian Gao is notable as it is made with non- glutinous rice and then sliced into the shape of a fat flat rice noodle and stir fried. The assorted meats were shrimp, chicken and Jinhua Ham which was definately the all star meat featured in this dish. All in all, this dish was fantastic.

Sliced Eel with Golden Mushrooms

Dishes like these are the reason I am constantly hunting out new restaurants and new cuisines. Who would have thought I could find a dish that was essentially eel swimming in a sea of delicious mushrooms. The Shanghainese evidently. Perfection. Eel is such a flavor rich fish and by pairing it with mushrooms the chef has guaranteed that all the juices and marinade lost from the eel while cooking would be absorbed by one of nature's most capable culinary absorbers.

To clue everybody in to just how high our standards have risen I will post pictures of the previous Shanghainese dishes as well:

Twice-Cooked Pork

Sliced Eel with Scallions

Xiao Long Bao

Hong Kong: Sham Shui Po - Post One

2010-02-13T23:25:00.008+08:00

So I had probably 80+ amazing pictures of Sham Shui Po, a district in Kowloon known for having some of the cheapest electronics in the world, an extensive jade market and an extremely impressive array of food markets and restaurants. Unfortunately the SD card that came with my Canon decided that it had witnessed some of the most impressive looking sea food and open air markets that it ever would and that it had nothing else to live for. I fully intend to go back to Sham Shui Po for a third time but this time I should manage to have something substantial to share. Until then I do have the food we ate in Sham Shui Po the second time we went:

Street-side Skewer Restaurant in Sham Shui Po

Somehow this meat skewer stand stood out to us amidst the countless food stands and markets in Sham Shui Po. I would wager that it had something to do with the fact that we could smell the meat over the stinky tofu which makes certain parts of the district smell exactly like an open sewer. I haven't actually tried stinky tofu yet but I intend to try it while in Hong Kong so that I will be able to compare it with the Taiwanese variation.

Street Skewers, Squid and Cuttlefish

After selecting the skewers, the merchant dropped them into a deep-fryer for 40 seconds or so before marinating and serving them to us. The squid was my personal favorite of the four, having the best texture and most flavor. The increased surface area and lack of girth seemed to hold the marinade better than the cuttlefish after responding to the deep-fry better as well.

Street Skewers: Pork Intestine and Bacon-Wrapped Hot Dog

These skewers were a bit decadent, the raw-foodist in me is just strong enough to make it such that I don't usually jump for bacon-wrapped anything but So-Han was not similarly disinclined. The intestine was more delicious and again I believe this was due mostly to the shape of the skewer, compare how dark the intestine is here versus in the first picture and you can see just how significantly frying and marinating changed the nature of the skewer.

After eating the skewers we wandered around the market, So-Han purchased an amazing tea-pot from a Jade vendor... but really the agent in that transaction was the tea pot which somehow made itself known to So-Han despite being in a bundle amidst a ton of really cool antiques and tea-pots while we were walking past intent on finding food neither of us being particularly interested in looking for tea-pots in Hong Kong as we are each going to regions where tea and tea-ware are actually produced. We ended up finding a restaurant with communal tables and no english signage and sat down to have the following:

Slippery Egg Shrimp Stir-Fried Rice Noodles

This is a dish that is more commonly seen with rice as opposed to rice noodles. We try to order a dish with hor fun noodles such as these in the restaurants we go to because they are perhaps the best medium to convey wok hei. These noodles and the other noodle dish which got eaten by the death of my SD card were some of the most delicious rice noodles I have ever eaten and had an amazing wok hei. The wok hei was so strong that it tasted almost like a subtle burn but this functioned in the same way that charring meat or sugar can bring out new and amazing tastes and textures.

Ginger Scallion Pork Rib Clay Pot

This dish was extremely rich in flavor and the ribs were so tender that they literally fell right off of the bone. One can see the chunks of ginger and cloves of garlic in this dish that were so instrumental in imparting an intensity of flavor to the pork which I rarely see. The clay pot was instrumental in both the intensity of flavor and tenderness of meat. I love clay pots. You can still see the steam rising out of the clay pot if you enlarge this picture.

Other sights of Sham Shui Po taken after the death of my SD Card:

Veggie Stand just North of Sham Shui Po

Hong Kong Man on Bicycle

Corner Apartment on a block near Sham Shui Po

Development Near Sham Shui Po

Hong Kong: Eating Our Way To Wan Chai Ferry

2010-02-12T11:46:00.008+08:00

We took the Wan Chai Ferry across to the Tsim Sha Tsui area in Kownloon last night. The last time we were in Wan Chai we walked past a restaurant and were presented with this scene:

We were meeting up with some friends and as such we were unable to stop to discover what these cute little birds were and what they tasted like. But we made a mental note to come back to this place. So come back we did.

We left our hotel last night, heading out for the ferry early so that we would have plenty of time to eat on the way. Our destination was the aforementioned restaurant, but we got a bit sidetracked along the way when we passed by a noodle shop which advertised itself as being recommended by both the michelin guide and openrice.com. We were pretty ready to eat and decided that we should try the place out, so in we went. They had a menu in cantonese and another in english/japanese. They also had a cohesive aesthetic throughout the restaurant, something we have never seen in a Hong Kong noodle shop before. Here is what we got:

Cuttlefish Ball Noodle Soup

Beef Tripe with Ground Dry Flatfish and Noodles

To prove to the world that I took science classes, I will engage in the scientific method and make a Hong Kong noodle shop hypothesis: guide recommendations and aesthetic appeal make noodles more expensive and less tasty. That is where my experiment ends however, I will assume that I am correct and go back to eating at hole-in-the-wall shops with communal tables and no english menus.

We finished our plates. Kids are starving in Africa after all, how could we justify wasting food? I turned to So-Han, "I still want to eat the baby birds." He agreed. So off we went to eat our second dinner!

Paddy Birds

What about the bones? You may wonder, as we did. You don't taste or feel them at all! The entire bird eats with a perfectly uniform consistency. Imagine the most beautiful tasty dark poultry meat you have ever eaten. Not Turkey or Chicken, I am talking about delicious duck or goose, the best bite of the bird. Thats what this little Paddy Bird tasted like as we bit off their heads before devouring them whole. I love Hong Kong.

Roast Suckling Pig

In the spirit of eating baby animals to while away our sorrows (So-Han accidentally deleted his blog before we ventured out on this excursion) we also ordered this Suckling Pig. My first experience with suckling pig, and I promise you that it will not be my last. Every bite of this meat was the most phenomenally tender pork I have eaten. If Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations Hong Kong is to be believed (which I definitely think it is), they roast the suckling pig with a blow torch in order to get the skin to be the consistency which it is, crispy sweet and delicious, rendered just perfectly to contrast texturally with the smooth tender pork and then to melt away to nothing along with the meat, leaving the eater in a state of culinary nirvana.

I forgot to take a picture of our third dish, Roast goose, and perhaps the best poultry I have ever eaten in my life. I hang my head in shame for this mistake, never again will I deem a dish "just another less than photogenic plate of poultry." I didn't know that birds could taste this decadent. Goose fat is the most delicious lipid in existence.

Once on the Ferry we got to behold Hong Kong Island at night

And we saw some of the decorations and preparations for Chinese New Year

As beautiful as Hong Kong is, Roasted Baby Animals will live on in my memory far longer than the skyline.

Hong Kong: Tai Woo Restaurant

2010-02-11T02:05:00.016+08:00

We went back to Tai Woo for dinner tonight, I haven't told you about the first time yet actually... I will get around to it, I promise. This was our first time to go back to a restaurant for a second time. We had a tentative no repeats policy which is still the guideline, just not the rule. We went back because we know the restaurant is both very good and open late. Which is important because I keep falling asleep after eating lunch and not waking up until 10:30-11:30 pm. All I do is eat, nap, eat, sleep, repeat. Its great. Usually there are a few hours worth of walking per day all told, so its not as if I am lacking in exercise. Particularly since we keep hiking up into the mountains. I love how quickly one can go from being in one of the most densely populated cities in the world to being alone in a rain forest. This city is awesome.

So Dinner:

Eggplant with Crab Meat and Shrimp Roe

This dish was really phenomenal. Some of the best eggplant I've ever eaten. The Crab and Roe provided a rich salty element to the sweet tender eggplant.

Squid with Spicy Salt

Squid, deep fried and battered. Timeless. I need to know what this batter is made of because it doesn't seem to trigger anything gluten - pain related within me. The battered frog we had during our first visit didn't bother me either.

Roast Eel with Jellyfish and Chinese Cucumber

This eel was definitely the starlet of the night. So-Han and I are much more familiar with eel prepared in the Japanese style... which is delicious... but totally different than this dish. The eel here is so crisp, the skin on the underside has a deep fried crispy quality that had the perfect combination of crunching and then melting in your mouth. The eel meat itself redefined my idea of how eel can taste and feel by being perfectly tender all the way through while maintaining a crisp edge. Each bite of eel was a crisp neat little packet of delicious. The jellyfish and cucumber both provided a salty - cured compliment to the sweetness of the eel.

Tai Woo is a great place to get a late night meal in Causeway Bay.

...or a normally timed meal as well... one can only assume...

P.S. I didn't take my camera to Tai Woo the first time, here is a video of the meal. The dishes brought were somewhat of a surprise as we were unable to read the menu and they didn't bring us an english one, unlike the second time we went where they brought us only the English menu (significantly more limited a selection than the 6+ menus in Cantonese, the squid above was the only dish shown which was actually on the English menu)

Hong Kong: Hakka Cuisine

2010-02-10T03:24:00.011+08:00

So I am kind of obsessed with the Hakka people, I love their architecture and would very much like to visit the Tulou in mainland China, Fujian Province. I now know that I am also totally obsessed with Hakka cuisine. This restaurant had no english signs, was hidden in a mall so well that we accidentally set off a fire alarm while trying to locate the place. It was well worth our efforts, however, and currently reigns as our top restaurant in Hong Kong. There are more images of each dish on my flickr.

Best Pork Belly Ever

Salt Baked Chicken

Black Pepper Beef Short Rib

Minced Pork Stuffed Tofu

Pork Belly so tender that my chopstick sunk right through

Tofu is not just for vegetarians, meat makes tofu go from great to fantastic

Close up of the most tender and flavorful short rib ever

Sweet Adzuki Bean Soup Dessert

The Hakka people live inland and specialize in pork and water fowl. Many of their dishes emphasize the communal nature of their living conditions and, as such, are dishes that must be shared with a huge group or ordered a day in advance. We made due with these classic Hakka dishes which could be ordered on the spot. I want to have an authentic Hakka feast at some point in my life. Someday. You are all invited.

Hong Kong: Cheap Food and Nature Walks

2010-02-09T17:25:00.014+08:00

I am going to try to step a bit more into the role of food blogger. There is an overwhelming amount of food going into my body (and camera.) I have so much to relate now! The pictures mostly speak for themselves. This price range and food range is where it is at, unpretentious, delicious, real people food. People in Hong Kong don't generally have enough room at home to cook for themselves or their family. Most people eat out for every meal. Our first meal of the day cost us $27 hkd, roughly $3 usd. We ordered it by me pointing at what some local was eating (pigs feet and flat rice noodles) and So-Han being able to figure out the characters for "noodle," "shrimp" and "wonton" on the all-Cantonese menu.

Shrimp Wonton Noodle Soup

Delicious Shrimp Wonton

Pig's Feet and Flat Rice Noodles

Bones from the Pig's Feet

Pigs feet are difficult to eat, I splashed myself with soup pretty extensively. I caught the eye of the waitress and grinned, she tried to hide her amusement but relaxed and laughed with me when she saw that I had a sense of humor. If I can make at least one stranger smile then the day has been a success. Pigs feet are very bony, much like chicken feet... Really all feet are very full of small bones. I had much more success breaking up the first foot, all of the bones of this foot made it into the small bone bowl. The second foot put up more of a fight and I had to leave it with some of its delicious bounty of cartilage, collagen and fat.

Having finished our well-rounded breakfast, we set out on our hike. Around the next corner we found a fruit market and after showing interest in a type of fruit that we could not identify, were man-handled into purchasing a bag full of them for $24 hkd, $3 usd.

This fruit is phenomenal and tastes slightly like a persimmon. If anybody knows what it is please let me know. We ate the entire bag during our hike, with the exception of those few we left as an offering at a Temple along the way.

Here are a few other photos, a sample of what you can find on my flickr page if you are really interested about the entire adventure.

It's not like we need an excuse to eat, but after this hike we were ready for lunch! We went to what we referred to as the BBQ place next door to our first meal (from day one, the land and sea noodle bowls.) Again, this meal cost us $62 hkd, or just under $8 usd. The increase in price from breakfast is due to: being closer to the nearby shopping district of Causeway Bay (where we are staying), the change from communal tables to individual tables, the staff being able to speak English and the change from hot water to hot tea as the drink served with the meal. I ordered Beef Stomach with Rice Noodles and So-Han got Roast Goose and Roast Pork with Rice.

Beef Stomach with Rice Noodles

Roast Goose

Roast Pork

Delicious Simmering Wok of Organ Meat

This was yet another phenomenal meal. Delicious organ meat is the surest way to warm my heart, and I have a very broad definition of delicious. That brings us up to now, I am going to go back and blog for the last couple of days at some point. So-Han and I are firmly convinced that Hong Kong is the best food city in the world. To prove this I am totally prepared to eat my way through every city in the world. Look at me, so willing to selflessly devote myself to such a great and noble cause.

Korean Food in Times Square Hong Kong

2010-02-09T08:04:00.005+08:00

Traditional Korean Ban Chan

Ban Chan are an essential element to Korean cuisine, and one of my favorites! The diversity of dishes which come out in this fashion is phenomenal. Ban Chan are traditionally plates of preserved meats and vegetables. They are meant to be eaten on their own, or added to other dishes on the table. This second feature is something that features largely into one of the most popular forms of eating Korean food, the Korean Barbeque. If you notice under the Ban Chan dishes there is a grate, this disk can be removed from the table to reveal a stove top which diners can use to cook different types of meat, fish and veggies. This restaurant brought out two dishes of Ban Chan per diner and, as we looked around the restaurant, it seemed that all the other tables had at least the same selection as we did if not more plates to match the fact that they had more diners. We tried to see if they would bring out more plates if we finished all of ours, but they said it would cost more and we had already ordered to match our Texas-sized stomachs.

Mackerel and Kimchee

Beef and Buckwheat Noodles

Ox Tail

Dessert

Hong Kong!

2010-02-06T01:41:00.011+08:00

I am trying to figure out why it took me twenty-one years to get to Hong Kong.

This city is amazing.

I have loved essentially every moment since my last post, every facet of Hong Kong is interesting, fun, delicious and beautiful. I have seen almost no homeless people nor beggars, public transportation is convenient, logical, on time, clean and there are no hecklers nor solicitors. 90% of my time since arriving has involved food, tea or communing with nature. Clothes are cheap and shopping is everywhere.

As I got to Hong Kong after 48 hours of travel only to find out that my bag wouldn't be arriving in HK until the following day, I decided that I would need to get some clothes rather than stretch my outfit out to the 72-96 hour mark. I spent the equivalent of 40 us dollars for designer slacks and a button up. Deals like this and better are everywhere! I seem to have arrived in the midst of one of the larger yearly sale periods. Shopping is not why I came to Hong Kong, but it would be a good reason to come!

Closer to my heart... food!! I managed to find the time to post a few pictures last night. So-han and I sat down in a noodle house for lunch right after meeting up. We ordered two bowls filled with the things wewere most excited about, one bowl of sea and one of land. The sea bowl(below) included: Squid, Cuddlefish Ball, Fish Cake, Octopus Roll with Rice Vermicelli while the land bowl (left) featured Ox Lung, Tendon, Tripe and Pork Intestine with Rice Vermicelli! Both were phenomenal and each bowl cost about 4 usd ~ 28 hkd.

We spent the whole day between lunch and dinner in the Longrun Pu-Erh teahouse sampling teas and speaking with the staff there. Longrun tea is the first tea company to be

traded, they can do this since they are based out of Hong Kong, were they based out of China proper, they wouldn't be able to go public. We tried four different teas while there: two shou pu-erh, one sheng pu-erh and

one black tea. We left there having bought a beeng cha (below, right) and were given a second tea cake as part of their celebrating having a stock

number. (they named a line of their pu-erh 2898, their stock number being HKG:2898.) We have been enjoying the 2898 brick since(below, left)

For dinner we found a restaurant called "Under Bridge Spicy Crab." There was a line out the door which we took to be a good sign (correctly.) We found out later that a chef from this restaurant was featured on Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations: Hong Kong.

We ordered Mantis Shrimp, a Sausage dish and the famous Spicy Crab!The shrimp and crab were delicious. Mantis shrimp are extremely tender despite their massive size! We ordered the spiciest level of crab on the menu and we were definitely delighted to find the dish a challenge to complete. The spice level was significant enough that my lips swelled up and we both had the distinct impression that the spice had worked it's way up through our skulls and into the back of our eyes.

was made all the more dire due to the fact that we were mostly using our hands in order to get the meat out of the crab and that

I have yet to find a satisfactory napkin in Hong Kong, double ply tissues are essentially as heavy duty as napkins get here and I promise you that those napkins to nothing to get greasy pepper seeds and seasonings off of your hands.

We were not bested however, putting down all the food which we were served. We called it an early night because we each needed some time to sit and recover from the meal, a feat accomplished with the aid of some of the 2898 brick.

Unfortunately, the 2898 brick also succeeded in caffeinating me so sufficiently that old mr. sandman left me wanting for his love and affection until the wee hours of the morning.

We woke up and went to go get some Dim Sum with two Japanese women we met at the Under Bridge Spicy Crab. Dim Sum is one of the coolest and least friendly to gluten-free people culinary traditions in the world.

I took many many photos of this meal, all of which I will post to flickr soon (the internet connection here is frustratingly slow) All of the dishes were delicious, I decided to try many of the dishes which I thought (read: knew) that I couldn't eat and, oddly, my body

delayed in its response until very late in the day (luckily since we spent most of the day far from restrooms.)

Chicken feet(up, right) are delicious and were certainly a highlight, right up there with the dish featuring the best tripe I've tasted in my life (bottom left).

After lunch we took a tram to the Tin Hau temple stop and then embarked on a four hour journey to find the Tin Hau temple which was located five minutes from the stop. This

journey took us way up one of the mountains in the center of the island and into the Tai Tam County Park (Quarry Bay Extension.)

There exist many well maintained trails and steps leading up into this mountainous rain-forest, however we somehow managed to take a wrong fork at some point and we found ourselves on a long long overgrown path

which disappeared and reappeared as we climbed and blazed paths around copious amounts of trash, trees and elephant-ear leaves. When we finally crested the last bowl of overgrown masonry, tires and other bits of miscellaneous origins and dates, we found ourselves facing a no-trespassing sign on this side of an apartment complex green space / garden.

Our only option had us hugging the fence, still maintaing our general origin of inwards and upwards. Our efforts were rewarded when we rejoined a paved street at the intersection of the chain-link fence and a well maintained walk path coming up from the general direction we had been trailblazing our way through for the past hour or so.

Robert Frost would be proud. Unable to see any way to continue up the mountains, we started walking down the street we had just met up with. Luckily, within a minute we found a path leading upwards and inwards towards what we were soon to learn was the Tai Tam Country Park. There were city employees sweeping the entrance to the path and So-Han asked one of the old men, in Cantonese, "where does this path lead", he responded in Cantonese before turning to me and saying "it leads to walking."

When old Chinese people speak broken English it sounds a lot more profound than when people of any other culture speak broken English. We still didn't actually know where the trail was leading us, but we were fine with being led to walking. Any amount of walking on well maintained trails is possible after a prolonged period spent fighting your way through plants, washed away bits of stone and concrete and climbing up inclines using trees, vines and long unloved slabs of concrete which broke through the rainforest in places fewer and more far between the further from the fork we got. We finally started our walk back down into the city after we spent a few minutes sitting at

a little pagoda structure besides a mountain stream in the midst of the park, near the center of Hong Kong Island. I didn't realize we were still looking for the temple, but So-Han wouldn't be bested by the city, so we finally made our way back to where we started the journey and almost immediately found the temple. Life is a journey, if I can't take the time to enjoy the path I take to get myself to my destinations then I will truly miss out on so much beauty (side note: I re-watched American Beauty while on the plane to Asia, I love every time I re-visit a piece of fiction and am rewarded for doing so by being able to draw new lessons and new insight from the media.

time I reach a wall in my general faith, patience, goodwill or tolerance, some force presents itself to console me and remind me of the beauty of it all. I am truly blessed.) The temple was very cool (picture right), the people that worked there didn't seem particularly fond to have me visit but I would probably start to feel the same way as them were my place of work and worship also a tourist destination. From the temple we went back to the hotel, found that my bag had arrived from the airline and I fell asleep for a good four hour or so nap while So-Han uploaded some of his videos and updated his blog.

(Edit: this meal can be viewed here)
Dinner consisted of Frog, Abalone and a white fish and pork dish. I left the hotel in a post-nap stupor and failed to remember to take my camera. Instead of using a photo to try to show you how the abalone tasted, I will use words to describe how it looked. The abalone was a particularly photogenic plane, four pieces each still in their half-shell (abalone shells are amazing, they have a phenomenal gleam to them which seems to reflect every color of the rainbow) and were plated with either the thinnest clearest vermicelli I have ever seen or with bean-thread noodles in a thin light brown sauce. All the dishes were delicious, as was the sweet soup dessert which was an adzuki bean and ginko treat. I am in love with adzuki beans. There is a massive glass mason jar full of them above my sink. They are the second most consumed bean in Asia, following the soybean.

My stomach decided it was tired of me letting my tongue and eyes lead and it reminded me of who was boss right after dinner.

Well, I'm not sure what is in store for tomorrow but I will be in touch, Keep a lookout for photos, I am adding photos more frequently than I am blogging because it generally takes a lot less time and creativity.

Thank you all for sharing in my adventures online! By donating your time and attention you are giving me a gift far more valuable than anything temporal. Community is true wealth. So sayeth It's a Wonderful Life.

The Joys of Travel

2010-02-03T17:45:00.003+08:00

I have been in airports for over 24 hours now and I have at least another 14-15 hours to go before I will be in Hong Kong.

I got to the Copenhagen airport at about 11 am, hoping to move from the 5:50 flight to London to the 1:30 flight as I had heard that a snow storm would be coming in and I feared that the later flight might be delayed or canceled. The earlier flight was full however, so I had arrived at the airport seven hours early in vain. This became even more apparent as the weather proved my fears well-founded and the time slipped past 5:50, past 6:15, past 6:30 without any flight information what-so-ever. Around this time I gave up on my gate and walked back towards the hub of the airport to figure out what was going on. I found the entire Departures board to be lit up in "Awaiting Info" and "Canceled," and then I found myself, along with every other passenger, diverted into the "transfer center." I took the number K321, looked at the board to see K215 buried amongst the other numbers from groups A, B and C. I spent until roughly 8:45 dealing with lines and bureaucracy until I was told to run to gate C26 to board BA flight 821 to London. I made it to London, was handed a hotel voucher, a convenient little baggie full of amenities, and the news that my bag should reach me in Hong Kong. European Airlines are less accommodating with the size of carry ons, many of them limit you to a single bag, not a personal item and bag, so my plan of not checking any luggage met an untimely end.

I feel like travel drama is probably more of me just venting than something that anybody else really cares about, but then again I have always been really bad at figuring out whether or not other people will enjoy something and I think that this blog post is part of a life philosophy which says do and talk about the things you know and are interested in rather than things which you think you can say that other people might like.

Well anyways, I am going to return to travel-zombie mode and continue waiting in the Cathay-Pacific lounge. Hopefully the next you all hear from me I will be eating delicious food in Hong Kong. I would rather be talking/thinking about food than airports.

I am totally in love with Copenhagen

2010-02-01T20:37:00.002+08:00

Copenhagen is awesome.

The city is amazingly beautiful. The people are beautiful, extremely nice and speak English perfectly. We are planning on eating Danish food today, but the ethnic food we have eaten has been amazing. The major (and essentially the only) minority group in Denmark is Asiatic, ranging from India to China. There are also some really good Middle Eastern restaurants along the major shopping street, the Strøget. We don't really plan on loving Danish cuisine, it is mostly big slabs of meat, fish, preserved fish and other preserved goods. It makes sense given where we are in the world, but it seems particularly boring. I am excited to try some fish and pickled fish... because fish are delicious.

Denmark is a very interesting country and is an outlier on many different indices, standing out as one of the happiest countries while having some of the highest taxes and most extreme levels of social welfare. There is a flat sales tax of 25% and the range of income tax is roughly 45-70%. Life in Denmark is not cheap as a result of the sales tax, we have been spending at least 20 dollars on most of our meals. Taxes like this would be a hugely contentious issue in the bipartisan politics of the US but here all of the many (7+) political parties are largely in support of social welfare economics. As somebody who generally opposes all forms of government, I find myself very convinced that the systems which are in place here, work here. Don't look to me for support in copying these politics in the US. Government isn't simply theory, and governments can't be copy-pasted. Denmark is much smaller, more homogenous, uniformly educated, has a growth rate that is exactly the same as their death rate, everybody (literally everybody) who we have met speaks at least three languages, perfectly. Social welfare works when your entire country is essentially playing for the A team is the big lesson Denmark has taught me. Even when we eat in asian food restaurants, the ethnic minorities speak to one another in their native languages, to the Danes in Danish and to us in English (and not the broken english we are used to when dining in authentic ethnic food restaurants in the US.) I have been here for a couple days and I can would totally be willing to live here. It has been cold, but not too cold. We saw it snow, almost got run over by a snow plow tractor who unexpectedly reversed. I have been wearing many layers (because a side-trip to scandinavia during a trip to the 70 degree and rainy part of Asia while not checking any bags is not the best logistic packing maneuver) and this has been comfortable and warm. The only part of my body consistently getting cold is my toes, and this is because Vans slip-ons do not make very good snow boots. Big surprise.

Today is our last full day in Copenhagen, I will fly to Hong Kong tomorrow and will arrive there the day after that. My travel day will start at 5:00 pm and I will arrive in Hong Kong at 4:00 pm the next day. Crazy. But now Brian is awake and it sounds like he just finished his shower, so I am off to shower and prepare myself to seize this, my last day in Scandinavia in the foreseeable future... But I promise you (speaking to the second person in a blog feels weird) that I will be back to Denmark.

-Max

Back in Paris

2010-01-26T06:17:00.003+08:00

Sushi delivery is awesome. There is definitely something to be said about cities large enough to have a vast selection of ethnic food that is one phone call and thirty minutes away from your door.

I am sure that the feeling I am about to convey will be dwarfed by what I experience when I visit Hong Kong and Taiwan, but being in a city this build up and dense is astounding. I wonder how far back you would have to go to see this area still untouched by humanity. There are so many layers of life, so much activity, so many people, so many buildings. Everybody makes due with such little space, everybody seems so much less friendly, with the increase in population density follows an increase in the density of society's discontents, this increase seems to harden all of those people who would ordinarily be friendly but have simply become disillusioned about humanity, one too many drunk homeless guys on the subway speaking loudly to the barbie dolls he has affixed to his backpack.

Eating in France has been mostly hit, little miss. Lots of Kebab, I'll take a picture next time. It is always shaved meat, french fries, iceberg lettuce and really bad tomatoes. Tasty... Not exactly my ideal meal, its about as far from organic and as far from raw-vegan as possible. The big kebab spit is a delicious way to cook meat and seems about as far out of reach for an individual's home kitchen as commercial kitchen appliances go, but then cooking meat is still not my forte. I don't really know what process takes meat from a living animal and makes a kebab spit out of it, that might be the mot frightening aspect of the whole thing. I also don't really know what happens to the meat overnight. Oh well. More reason to eat raw-vegan when I can arrange it.

I found quinoa! It was in the international section of Carrefour supermarket in Bordeaux. Apple cider vinegar is also more common here, there are a few brands, organic and not.

The produce selections have been pretty lacking in all the supermarkets I have visited in France. I haven't seen any Kale in this country at all, I did see something called Lamb's lettuce which was pretty tasty, bites like arugula, and I'm pretty sure it isn't lambs-quarters. I also haven't seen any mushrooms except for buttons. I will be visiting the big supermarket in this district of Paris soon, with my camera. The things I got the most excited about when I visited it last week were: the entire cow tongue, large boxes full of tripe and huge selections of unpasteurized goat and sheep cheese.

These items sound particularly different than the foods which that part of my brain which craves green smoothies drools over, but this is what happens when you visit French supermarkets.

They also sell the meat from the birds which are raised in the style to make foie gras in the supermarket. Definitely one of the best tasting pieces of duck I have ever had. It really sucks that the least sustainable and least healthy methods of raising animals are the tastiest. I wish that grass-fed beef was ridiculously delicious, that free-range ducks tasted as rich as the foie gras duck. I guess that is one of the big things I love about raw-vegan. Organic fruits and veggies do taste better, fresher tastes better, local tastes better.

I need to go find a place to charge my laptop, the converter I brought doesn't have a ground on it so I am borrowing converters until I can find a new one, hopefully tomorrow.

Bordeaux

2010-01-25T06:54:00.004+08:00

It is almost midnight Sunday night and I am in Bordeaux. The past few days have been such a whirl.

Thursday was a 17 hour day since I lost 7 hours flying east. I slept the entire ~10 hour plane ride so waking up friday wasn't bad.

Friday was my first day in France. Brian met me at the airport and we took the RER from the airport to Brian's flat. His flat is essentially an efficiency and I thought it was crazy small until I saw another apartment later that day which was probably the same size of my kitchen. The later was also the location of a party that had at least 20 people in it. That was actually a lot of fun. They call international students "erasmus" students. I got to practice my spanish with a bunch of people from across the spanish speaking world and speak english with the rest. I need to learn more languages... I guess thats the point of the trip though so I am being pro-active about it. Friday night was too late and Saturday morning too early.

The three hours of sleep that I got were nowhere near enough but I could luckily pass off my stupor as jet lag. We went straight to the TGV to train from Paris to Bordeaux. The countryside was beautiful, I noticed it briefly before I fell asleep. We got into Bordeaux, took a brief tour of the town, then got some food from the supermarket and prepared some dinner at Brian and Chloe's friends house who we are staying with (Max and Melissa). It was another late night, one of Max and Melissa's friends came over, he didn't really speak English, we communicated by mean of showing one another electronic dance music and hip hop on my laptop and youtube. That was an experience. The sleeping situation here is a long string of fold out couches. It really isn't bad though.

We woke up today at around 1, shutters that close on the outside of the building are very effective at blocking out light. Living in an apartment with only one window helps to filter out light as well. We met up with a friend that Brian met in New Orleans who is now working for a local vineyard. He drove us around the region and gave us a nice tour of a vineyard. The pictures are on my flickr.

More thoughts later, talking about eating in France will be the subject of my next post. I am having a great time. Too busy doing to blog about it.

This is going to be way too scattered for any clever phrase... except for this one

2010-01-20T11:30:00.001+08:00

So, its Tuesday night, I leave Thursday afternoon. This means I have less than 48 hours to wrap up everything.

Don't feel too sorry for me, I mean I am sitting here blogging rather than cleaning, packing, organizing, paying bills, sleeping or anything else that could be considered moderately productive.

Maybe I'm being too hard on myself, I started blogging in order to connect to my friends and family members in a way which could be sustained despite my physical distance. I suppose I am being productive in-so-far as I am developing that connection.

Now I feel better. Sorry to have dragged you all through that... it needed to happen.

So I will be driving to Houston at 6 am, going directly to TECO Houston. Because of the political status of Taiwan (China refuses to acknowledge Taiwan as a separate government but does acknowledge it as a separate economic entity) Nations which trade with China cannot have a Taiwanese "embassy" or "consulate" but instead they have the TECO - Taipei Economic and Cultural Office.

The power of semantics...

So I called TECO today and asked them what I should do since I don't have my acceptance letter from either school yet but would rather not enter the country on the Visa Waiver Program as I will then not be able to extend my stay beyond 30 days. I received an answer which has quelled all my nagging worry. I should just get an extendable tourist visa! Of course! I can change it to a student visa in Taiwan! Yay!

This should seem like common sense... Or maybe it should seem like common sense to me as I have been google searching visas non stop for a couple weeks. But it wasn't an option found on any website! I continually looked for tourist visa Taiwan, hoping to read the answer that I now know to be my future... It is nowhere to be found online (except for here... now) All websites make the supposition that any tourist will not need a visa because they can enter the country on the VWP(visa waiver program) and as such, they don't even address the fact that you can get a 60-day tourist visa extendable to a maximum of 180 days. And they can process same day! Hopefully this means instantly or else I will be entertaining myself in Houston all day.

So far this blog post is not so scattered... the title could read "48 hours, no visa, no worries" or something to that extent. I suppose that blogging is static, I could go back and change the title, but the stasis of literature and the internet is one of my big turn offs to written language. Once I hit publish, these words will always Be. Never changeable. Never fluid. Where else in life do we find such permanence. Stasis is artificial, life is change. Language should be fluid, blogging will be a dialogue, a journal, not an essay.

I will be coming to terms with blogging throughout these posts. The fact that I am blogging is still sitting somewhat heavily upon my soul. Musings for another day... perhaps from the airport when I really do have time to kill...

Four Days Until Paris

2010-01-18T03:47:00.000+08:00

Four days from today I am leaving the country on a four month long, round the world journey. Not too long ago this trip was in the realm of "wouldn't it be cool if." Over the holidays the idea moved into the "hey it might be a good time to." Now I find myself staring at my wall calender, four days away from finding myself packed and at the airport.

The ultimate goals of this trip are: 1) to visit Asia and 2) to begin learning Mandarin. I will be spending three weeks in Hong Kong (Feb 3 - Feb 25) and then I will be flying to Taipei for three months. (Feb 25 - May 28) I have applied to two language centers in Taipei but I wont receive word back from them until while I am overseas. Keeping my fingers crossed on that one. (notice: levity masking a fear which keeps me up at night)

This blog exists as a bridge to keep in touch with friends and family members. If you know me in real life then you might have noticed that the things I talk at length about are mostly just food, agriculture and tea. If you notice that the blog posts to follow this one feature those three elements almost exclusively, I hope you wont be too surprised.

Hopefully this Google affiliated blog engine will be accessible while I am in Hong Kong. Only time will tell if Google is serious about its moral opposition to Chinese Internet policy or whether they were merely firing some shots across the brow of China. My bet is that Google won't give up the fastest growing economy in the world in order to stand up against censorship, but hopefully California-based Google will prove this Texas-born cynic wrong. (even if it means I can't blog from Hong Kong and am forced just go dark for three weeks, maybe flickr will work.. a picture is worth a thousand words right? If only I could have created a picture to express all the elements of this blog post)

Anyway, getting back to this blog post's title, I have a lot to do, particularly since I need to go to the Taiwanese consulate in Houston to get a student visa but I don't have an acceptance letter from either school yet, which is usually a requirement for a visa. Trust me, my pending acceptance is not looming heavily over me or anything, not at all burdensome. In no way are there any dark clouds off on my horizon, oh boy how lucky I am to embark on my journey footloose and fancy free!