The Hong Kong Book Centre
One of my first stops in Hong Kong was a visit to one of the English language bookshops mentioned in my China guidebook. After my first Dim Sum cookery lesson in Shanghai I had been unable to find a Dim Sum book in the city, so I thought it was best to look for a Dim Sum cookbook in the Canton home of these dumplings and it would be in English too. I found my book in this basement bookstore on Des Voeux Road in Central, which I was pleased about, although I would have welcomed a Mandarin translation alongside the recipes to help me with shopping back in Shanghai. Now I’m going to have to do some serious work with my Pleco dictionary (a digital dictionary recommended by Rozy is the tool of choice where I can get English words translated into Chinese together with recording of how it should sound in Mandarin
Balzac and The Little Chinese Seamstress
or, going in the opposite direction, I can write the Mandarin character on the screen – written in the correct order, difficult for a left-hander like me -and get back an English translation.) Having got my book I naturally had to have a browse around. I had to be good and buy nothing else, but I came across what I think will be a gem of a book when I get hold of it.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress looked good in the shop and I later saw that it has some excellent reviews on Amazon, so if any members of my book club are reading this, this is my book of choice for next year. Another interesting book was The Kimchi Cookbook. I had been introduced to Kimchi by Rozy and the girl who was to be her flat mate when they were both in Beijing for a year. Joanna was doing a joint Chinese and Korean course at SOAS so the three of us met at a Korean Restaurant just south of Centre Point in south east corner of the junction of London’s Tottenham Court Road and New Oxford Street.
Apparently the Koreans eat Kimchi with everything and in London we had it as a pickle-cum-vegetable dish as part of our meal. Living in amongst ex-pat Koreans in Shanghai there is Kimchi for sale all around us. It appears not to be just a pickled vegetable, as I had thought, but the sauce made with garlic, chilli and fish sauce as some of the ingredients and can be used to flavour all sorts of things such as squid. We bought some squid kimchi the other day and rather enjoyed it, so Richard later bought a big bag of Chinese cabbage Kimchi. That was a mistake. There was so much of it. It was very hot. The cabbage leaves were huge and impossible to pick up with chopsticks. (Yes, we eat our evening meal with chopsticks to try and improve our technique) and it went on and on for ever: meal after meal. So this would be a cookery book for Richard, really. Because we do need some help in working out what Kimchi is really all about, and what we should be doing with it, if we ever resort to buying it again.
Wizard Night bus and Muggle bus
After the book shop I just wondered around Central, the area where the recent demonstrations had been focused. We both independently decided that J K Rowling must have visited Hong Kong whilst she was in the middle of writing the Harry Potter series. Where else would she have got inspiration for the night bus, except from the old trams that clatter across the north of Hong Kong island from Kennedy Town in the west to Chai Wan in the east?
From thoughts of books and Harry Potter it was onto socks. I needed to buy some more pairs and although there are 7 Marks and Spencer’s in Shanghai, I
Beef & Horseradish Sandwich
haven’t knowingly been anywhere near one yet. The city is so huge and the modern shops are all in Malls, so this makes it very difficult for the casual shopper. There are Shopping Malls in Hong Kong, of course, but the flagship M&S on the island is out on the street and easy to spot. As well as getting socks I bought lunch – a beef and horseradish sandwich. Last night when we reached the hotel we were joined in the lift by the smell of a pizza (and the gentlemen carrying the source of it). It’s funny how
Kentish Bramley Apple Hot Cross Buns
the smell of foods from home can really stimulate your tastebuds. We hadn’t really wanted much until then, having been more or less satisfied with our plane food, but smelling that pizza in the lift took us on the hunt for the local Pizza Hut. In a similar way the beef sandwich was evidently calling me in M&S the next day and I did find myself hunting, unsuccessfully, for a jar of marmite. It is funny to find out what foods you really miss from home. Some are surprisingly odd. I was also amused to find Kentish Bramley Apple Hot Cross Buns, although I resisted the temptation to buy them. I wonder what sort of food miles we are talking here?
For the rest of the afternoon I wandered around Central Hong Kong remembering. The smell of Hong Kong, a mixture of Chinese five spice and incense is very evocative for me. It was nice to have gone at this time of year. The temperature was only 20° and it was drizzling – a British summer in fact – and I was amused to see many locals in padded coats and fur-lined boots. I watched the men on the scaffolding, still not much in the way of safety equipment, still using bamboo, so much better than metal in the tropics. It is lightweight, doesn’t get hot, strong and yet it can be used so that it can curve around buildings, as in the right hand picture. I heard no constant clattering of Mah-jong tiles anywhere I went during my brief stay. In the more Chinese Districts in the 1980s there would be this constant clatter of tiles being turned in rooms way above your head as people gambled on the game to try to improve their prospects. The only legal gambling in Hong Kong is at the racecourse in Happy Valley on a Wednesday evening when the same money changes hands as does for a year’s worth on the UK Tote.
Travellator
I took the travellator up to the Mid-Levels (the part of the town above Central on the way up towards The Peak, the main mountain in Hong Kong Island) – a series of canopied moving pavements that cleverly move you up the steep hillside, to browse around the antique shops on Hollywood Road. In a shop selling antiques and curios I watched an american woman buy a Qing Dynasty coat for $5000, with no attempt to bargain. On the way back down the hill I marvelled at how the elderly Chinese still manage to navigate these steep hillsides with their steep steps and steep roads. I stopped off in a paper goods shop before heading back to the hotel, buying myself a couple of cheap paper fans for the summer heat to come in Shanghai and some paper lanterns to decorate our garden in Fordwich come party time.
That evening I was due at The Dickens Bar in the basement of The Excelsior Hotel on Gloucester Road to meet up with Richard (& colleagues) who had been wandering the streets looking at the food being sold in cafes across Hong Kong. (The next day he was to do the same thing, only this time it would be food retailers.) This bar is a bar for
The Jade Garden
sportsmen, well one for people who like watching sport anyway, and is the social focal point of HK during the Hong Kong 7s which will be played at the end of the month. After a couple of beers the others left for a work function, whilst Richard and I went for a meal at the Jade Garden around the corner, to taste some authentic Cantonese food. We had some delicious food here, but also our first real mistake ordering food – to the extent that when the dish arrived on the table we denied having ordered it because it looked nothing like we expected. The dish in question was prawn and soy bean and I was expecting some prawns tossed with some
Prawn and Soy Bean with a Whelk & Portuguese Sauce in the background
edamame beans. What turned up was a creamy mush of fresh tofu with some slivers of spring onion and some prawns buried under the creamy gloop. Eventually we accepted the dish, but it had been the last to arrive and although it didn’t taste bad, the fresh tofu having a delicate consistency a bit like farm fresh buffalo mozzarella it wasn’t very appealing to already fullish stomachs. But the other dishes of huge stir fried prawns and the huge whelks with Portuguese sauce were fine (even if the last case the
Sizzling pork in a honey sauce
curry flavour was rather unexpected – it must have been Indian Goa Portuguese rather than from Portugal itself and a dish perhaps served in Macau the former Portuguese enclave on the other side of the Pearl River from Hong Kong). The sizzling pork dish was good too with some kind of sour beans served with a sweet honey sauce – a much better version of sweet and sour sauce than you usually find in Cantonese Chinese takeaways back home.
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