Dim Summing it all Up

I appreciate your having put up with my post headlines all these weeks.  This is the last one so you won’t have to put up with any more.

We’ve been in Hong Kong, staying at the Stanford Hillview Hotel, which is located on Knutsford Terrace.  Knutsford Terrace is a little like Belden Place in San Francisco, only much more so — it’s one restaurant after another, none of them anything particularly special.  Not a one of them serves Cantonese food, so they were all off the list:  it’s easy enough for us to eat at Belden Place when we get home.  There was one little bar, though, called Big Tree Pub, so we had a beer one night after dinner, and took some pictures.

We’ve done very well with Cantonese food here:  the Internet pointed out a few places, we stumbled on one nice place, and a brochure we found today in the tourist office listing culinary awards pointed out another.

  • Thursday night we went to Loong Yuen in the Holiday Inn basement.
  • We had dim sum Friday morning at Serenade, a restaurant with a second-floor view of the harbor near the Kowloon Star Ferry Terminal.
  • Friday night we got a table at Hutong, a view restaurant on the 28th floor, which had incredibly cute interior design:  it was very dark (one spotlight exactly in the center of each table, shining on each new course as it was served) and there were birdcages everywhere, and lots of bamboo.  Their main fault was not pointing out that the two things we ordered looked too similar:  both white seafood in yellow sauce (though the tangerine sauce on the prawns tasted quite different from the urchin sauce on the squid).  It was certainly the most expensive meal of the trip, $150 for the two of us, without even having any wine.
  • We had dim sum Saturday morning at The Square, located in the same building as the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.  It was deserted at 11 am, but gradually filled up.  The lobster dumpling and the marinated whelk were quite nice.  The basic steamed pork bun was delightfully fluffy.
  • Saturday night, after wandering around a Food Expo which happened to be at the convention center, we had a nice rice casserole at Yat Tung Heen, a restaurant in a nearby shopping center.
  • Tonight, the brochure referred us to Tai Woo in Causeway Bay, where we had their award-winning crab meat soup, their award-winning spicy shrimp, their award-winning crispy juicy braised beef, and their award-winning dessert balls in two styles.

Between eating, we’ve tried to engage in the official Hong Kong activity — shopping — but I guess we’re bad shoppers:  we don’t really need anything.  So there were other diversions like taking the Peak Tram to the top of the mountain, walking through the walk-through aviary in Hong Kong Park (highly recommended), and going to the food expo mentioned above, which was packed:  it was difficult to walk through the aisles.  Lots of free samples, like Costco, of soy milk or herbal drinks, or pork skins, but nothing to make dinner out of.  Mostly they were selling prepackaged food (much of it imported:  there was Canadian maple syrup, Norwegian salmon oil, and various American food).

Today we didn’t do much:  we reorganized the suitcases for my departure tomorrow, and Ray’s ongoing travel; found the place mentioned in the top hit for the search “mangosteen gelato” but were disappointed to find out that they were out of it (their gelato was unique in that it was all Splenda-dly sugar-free); found a weekly show in Kowloon Park of martial arts and dragon dancing, and watched it for awhile.

Ray has been jerked around by JetBlue:  his direct flight from Boston to SF was originally scheduled for 9:30 am or so, and he was notified that it had been changed to a flight connecting through New York leaving at 6 am.  So now he’s trying to cancel it and fly on Southwest instead.  I should think that when you buy a plane ticket, the price you agree to buy it at takes into account when it is and whether or not it is direct; if the airline changes it, especially like they did in this case, they should offer you the chance to cancel it without penalty.  Maybe they will, but it’s difficult to communicate with them from Hong Kong.  Are we going to wait on hold on our cell phone?  Maybe we should use Skype or something.  They promised to respond to our emails within a week or so — maybe longer since they’re extra-busy right now.  I’ll be home so maybe I can help communicate.

It’s time to post this and go to sleep, so the various alarms can get us up at 7 in time to get to the 8:00 shuttle to the 8:50 airport express, getting to the airport by 9:30 in time for my 11:45 flight, which arrives in SF two and a half hours earlier, through the magic of the international date line.  Somehow it still lasts twelve and a half hours.  After seventeen hours of traveling, assuming customs is reasonably quick, I’ll be home.

And hopefully, you’ll be hearing from Ray about how the rest of his trip goes.  I’m looking forward to it.