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on strawberry daiquiris and pork belly: hk trip pt. 3

One of the things I love most about traveling is eating, especially after a long day of walking. Since good things come in twos, here are my two new favorite food discoveries on my recent trip to Hong Kong.

1. Crispy pork belly dim sum

Being from the South, I'm naturally inclined to like pork but there's no pork quite like Cantonese fried pork belly. It has the richness of bacon combined with the meaty tenderness of a pork chop finished with a layer of crispy crackling. When dipped in spicy mustard, these cubes of fried heaven dissolve away in your mouth while snapping awake your taste buds all at the same time. I can't believe I've been in China for so long and never discovered these until just last week.

My heart probably won't be happy about this new food find but my stomach will be.

2. Strawberry daiquiris at Feather Boa
Once a hidden gem, this small, violently sky blue, bohemian-chic bar has been outed like a Republican senator in an airport bathroom. While it still retains it's unassuming facade with only a small placard saying "Private Members Only," on any given weekend night, this place is packed with tourists, douchey expats, and douchey expat tourists.

Despite it being effectively Hong Kong's worst kept secret, FB still tries to maintain it's members only image by asking for a "Membership Card" before they fill your order, an inane practice since if you don't have a FB Membership Card, any form of ID will do: Georgia driver's license? OK! Diner's Club card. Um... OK! Basically, if you have the money to buy their drinks, you're a member of the club. The only thing more obnoxious than a members only club is the pretension of being a members only club.

The people combined with the bar's fake air of exclusivity and very real air of self satisfaction would make this place an instant write off it it weren't for the fact that they serve perhaps the most delicious strawberry daiquiris in all of Hong Kong...nay, dare I say it? The world.



The lighting in this photo is pretty bad. I'm fairly certain that the lights at FB were purposefully kept just above a low flicker probably to make the douchey clientele look more attractive to one another. Each pomello sized glass is dipped lavishly with cocoa powder and filled with a frothy smoothie of fresh strawberries and rum. Each mouthful was like tasting spring tinged with chocolate kisses. It was absolutely delicious.

Jamie and I gleefully lapped up the cocoa powder at the edges of our glasses like children who broke into the jam jar until our mouths were covered with chocolate. When I was in elementary school, I once read a book called The Search for Delicious where a boy sets off to find what epitomizes delicious is. At the end, the boy discovered delicious to be "a drink of cold water on a hot day." I'm fairly certain he came to this conclusion because he'd never had FB's strawberry daiquiris.

TOTALLY UNRELATED BUT AWESOME AND BLOGWORTHY FOOD PHOTO FIND
3. The Hello Kitty Cupcake

on mini objects: hk trip pt. 2

I love mini objects to an almost obsessive extent where I fear I may become one of those crazy cat ladies who lives by herself in an apartment lined with menageries filled with tiny things.

Aside from being full of mini old people, J and I managed to find a couple more mini things during our trip to Hong Kong:

1. Mini guns that shot mini plastic bullets that we bought from a street vending machine. After we bought them, the rest of our day was filled with us firing shots at one another on the bus, in restaurants and on the streets. At one point, we put on sunglasses and tried to shoot them at each other's eyes. We were like children. Massive 25+ year old children.





2. A mini toilet in the women's bathroom in a mall somewhere in Hong Kong called "the peak." It came up to our knees. Squeee!

on bus stations and running through airports: hk trip pt. 1

After being in China for over 3 years, I took my very first trip to Hong Kong last weekend with J. In an effort to save money, we convinced ourselves it would be a good idea to go to Hong Kong via Shenzhen. It was not a good idea. It wasn't even a bad idea. It was perhaps the worst idea ever. In saving what ended up amounting to less than $100 total we spent over 16 hours traveling (round trip) in one of the most circuitous routes ever.

Three highlights from the journey there and back again. One there and two back again.

1. THERE: The stop over in mystery city en route between Shanghai and Shenzhen.

We were made to get off the plane (the only one in the entire airport apparently) and wait in a one room building that resembled a bus station:


The state of the art flight board:


2. BACK AGAIN: Running at full speed, pell mell, family-in-Home-Alone-2-Lost-in-New-York style, through the Shenzhen airport after getting off at the wrong terminal with only 40 minutes to check in and board our flight.

We made it, panting and sweating only to sit on a plane that was delayed on the runway for 20 min. To add insult to injury, in between us sprinting from our bus (OHHHH yes, we took a bus from HK to Shenzhen, we are SOOOO cheap...) to terminal A to terminal B to gate 2 to plane seat 35 D/E, neither J nor I got any food prior to our 10pm flight and as the adrenalin slowly drained from our systems we started to realize just how hungry we were. So hungry that when the Air China snack trolley rolled by, we both actually cried, "WHEEE!" at the sight of these:


They tasted about how they looked but we ate them anyways. By God we ate them... and then drank tomato juice pretending it was tomato soup. Sad.

3. BACK AGAIN: Getting locked in at the Pudong International Airport.

The Pudong airport in Shanghai is a major aviation hub in Asia occupying a 40 kilometer square site. It's sends off and lands in an average of 60 million passengers a year and provides the world's first commercial high-speed maglev service to downtown Pudong in 7 minutes and 20 seconds. It is big, it is new, it is shiny and it is supposedly open 24 hours a day.

Last night J and I learned an important lesson about airports: just because one is "open," it does not necessarily mean it is functioning as we found ourselves, plus 300 other Air China, passengers locked inside Pudong Airport.




After 20 minutes of calling people within the airport and being assured that someone would be there "right away," the crowd decided to take matters into their own hands and in a scene worthy of Lord of the Flies should it have been set within the confines of an airport, anarchy broke loose:


Amidst the crowd came cries of, "Don't, don't! Too dangerous!" someone climbed up onto the railing in a futile attempt to climb over the glass wall. Fueled by the first man's subversive spirit, another rallied the crowd to yell for help in the vain hopes that if we made enough noise, the airport had to notice.

Man: "ONE! TWO! THREE!"
Crowd: "SAVE US AHHHH!"
Man: "ONE! TWO! THREE!"
Crowd: "SAVE US AHHHH!"
Man: "ONE! TWO! THREE!"
Crowd: "SAVE US AHHHH!"
On the second round of yelling for help, someone (or maybe multiple people) kicked the door open with brute force.
Crowd: "YAYYYYYY!"

We all surged out in one heady swoosh and ran for the exit but alas, the freedom was a false one. In between us and freedom stood a row of customs desks flanked by confused but stony faced custom officials. Some of our 300 tried to pass only to be rebuffed by officials since our flight was not an international one. J and I broke about fifty international flight laws by claiming we had come in on an international flight hoping to get in on the merit of our foreign passports. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Unfortunately neither her nor I are very good liars and were similarly turned away. The fleeting sweetness of freedom pricked even sharper in the face of this bitter defeat.

In the 60 minutes that ensued J and I saw one man pounding at the fire alarm, grown men kicking things like 4 year olds losing it at the grocery store, a group of smokers sullenly smoking in the middle of the terminal, people running up the down escalator (ok, ok, me and J running up the down escalator...) and a lot of angry people yelling at various officials. In a crisis you really start to realize how the majority of people are, at their core, all the same. Despite the yelling people being from obviously disparate groups in terms of age, dress and social hierarchy, they screamed the same five words/phrases: asshole, ridiculous, one hour wait, you ARE responsible, I'm going to get you fired as if they had rehearsed for this moment their entire lives. Once they had exhausted their five thoughts, they started over and repeated the list in a slightly different order, their voices rising an octave with each successive remuneration. Once in awhile someone would think of a new insult and the others would quickly add it to their repertoire of verbal barbs.

While it was easy, at the start, to feel bad for the hapless airport attendees, none of which were actually at fault for putting us in this situation, as the minutes dragged by we felt less and less sympathetic. Towards the end I was filled a gleeful stab of malicious pleasure every time I heard a new abusive epithet hurled. Finally, one official led the crowd back to our original holding pen. The door on it had closed, ironically keeping us out from the very place where we were trying to break out from just an hour prior.

A group of enterprising passengers, high on presumably on righteous anger, attacked the glass door yelling, "GIVE US THE PIN CODE OR WE'LL TEAR DOWN THIS DOOR!" and then, just when I thought things could not get more surreal, I watched as the guard lean down to his walkie talkie and say this to the person on the other end, "Hurry up and give me the code or the crowd will tear this door down." World goes insane, the mob rules supreme. A reply came back crackly and indistinguishable from the other end but it was too late, the door few open with a crack and bang and all 300 passengers flooded into the pen where they had once flooded out.

The culprit to all of this? Someone had opened up the international corridor rather than the domestic one. The domestic corridor door was pried opened and we ran towards freedom laughing like madmen. Finally at 2am, I sat with J in a cab watching the lights of the Pudong airport fade behind us. Welcome home.

ridiculous conversations when taken out of context

In reference to this post on CSMB on this phenomenom, below is a snippet from the conversation that ensued. Snippet being way more entertaining when taken as snippet vs when read in the context of the overall conversation:

sammy6000: but i dont have a donk
D: lame
sammy6000: :-(
I know
I could make one and we could take it with us to a normal night at shelter

please buy this for me

Combining my two great loves: chocolate and sharpening pencils, I saw this and immediately "OOOHHHH'ed" way too loudly while working at my office.

"Chocolate-Pencils is the product of a collaboration pairing Japanese architect and designer Oki Sato with patissier (and Iron Chef champion) Tsujiguchi Hironobu, the man behind Tokyo's boutique dessert shops Mont St. Claire and Le Chocolat de H." Coolhunting.com

new home

Ahhhh, the early days of March. Despite the (still) dreary weather, I'm keeping the faith alive that this month will be way better than the last. Considering the fact that February totally kicked my ass, it shouldn't be too hard a goal to reach. New month, new changes. First and foremost, I have moved accounts, departments and desks. I'm back to Accounts working on Coca Cola (Atlanta holla back!). New account = new desk or in my case, my old desk back on the 4th floor next to the illustriously mean spirited Jenn Wong.

I spent the majority of the morning redecorating my old desk or "nesting" as Jenn oh so cleverly commented. Everything has been put into it's original place, although my mini food collection has expanded quite a bit over the last few months I was up on the 5th floor and I seem to have accumulated a kind of unhealthy number of wooden magnets. Anyways, I'm all moved in and ready to rock it.

Our friend Yaya has made the switch to Accounts and has moved down to our table for six as well. It's all girls at the table except for Sosuke, a Japanese planner prone to sarcasm and the occasional (and totally awesome) ranting emails written in all caps. As a result, the 4th floor today has been filled with an abnormal amount of gossip followed by cackling. Queen bee!