Tea Appreciation

Here's something different... and FREE!

The Hong Kong Tourism Board proudly presents its Chinese Tea Appreciation Class.

All the info can be found via the link, so I won't repeat it here. Basically during the class you learn about the 6 types of Chinese tea, how to brew them and what kinds of pots the master tea masters use for each type of tea and why, and you get to try lots of kinds of tea. (Including one memorable strong tea called 'Kung Fu Tea'!)

Manca, Vero, Myself, and Mum.

(We met up with my friends after we visited Ocean Park)

The tea master. She was really interesting and made lots of cute, corny jokes

This is the group for the hour-long Tea Appreciation class. There were seven of us, and four others.

As it if a free class, they encourage you to buy tea or tea pots, or have dinner at the adjoining restaurant after the class, but there is no pressure. The other girls stayed for dinner, and they reported the food to be delicious!

Veggie Dinners - Herbivores

On Friday night Emilia, Maria, Rebecca and myself had dinner at The Herbivores, a small vegetarian/vegan place in Central.

It was realtively easy to find, but note that walking from Central Station to Herbivores will take you up several hills at a 45 to 55 degree angle. If you are wearing shoes like this:

make sure to bring someone to hold on to for the walk.

(I swear I actually saw a lady wearing these shoes the other day!  They could have been imitation Louboutins, but with two concept stores and 11 retailers in Hong Kong, I'm inclined to believe they were real).

This review notes that Herbivores is small - and it is. When we arrived at about 8:30pm, the inside table (tables? I didn't venture inside, but the shop is quite narrow and I only saw one long table in the middle of the shop with about 10 people) were full, so the four of us sat at the single outdoor table.

The food was good, but the prices for a main meal started at $148. When you live on campus and a meal and dessert and a drink doesn't even total $50, you forget what the price of a 'normal' dinner is.

I ordered a rice omelette, made with mushrooms and served with a pasta-style tomato sauce. The parsley belonged back on the tree though, not on my plate.

We spent dinner talking about the finer points of second language acquisition in bilingual environments (like Sweden) as opposed to monolingual environments (like the US or Australia), and about how burnt Emilia got on her hike that day.

Although the dessert options were tempting, we walked back down the hill to one of my new favourite places - Yoppi - for make-it-mix-it-yourself frozen yoghurt.

Closing remarks: I had bought the bag earlier that day from H&M. I would like to revise my earlier comments on shopping - if you go to the H&M at Sha Tin on a weekday as soon as it opens (at 10:30), you won't have to wait for a changeroom. I bought two dresses and a bag within an hour. Excellent.

Veggie Dinners - Harvester

Friday nights are now Vegetarian Restaurant Night. Emilia is our proud, fearless leader, and we follow her to wherever she recommends in Hong Kong's meat-free landscape.

Last week we went to Harvester, a self-serve buffet-style, vegetarian/free trade/organic, Chinese/Western restaurant in Sheung Wan where you load up your plate with whatever you like and pay per 100g.

Pros: The food is really great! Look here and here for reviews. Also there is unlimited soup, rice and congee that you help yourself to after you have paid for your main plate, so you definitely won't go hungry.

This was my meal, and it cost $75. Not bad at all.

Cons: The chairs are pretty uncomfortable. You don't notice it when you first sit down, but by the time you've finished eating and are feeling happy and content with the world from all the delicious food, you realise your bum's gone to sleep.

Although the people in the shop don't speak much English, they are very accommodating. When the 11 of us filed in the front doors (we had a lot of interest for Veggie Dinner this week!) they immediately started pushing tables together for us.

There is apparently also the option to have a hotpot if you have a large group of people, but we only know this because a group of elderly people sitting at the table next to us were eating this. However none of the reviews I've read on the Internet have mentioned this. Next time we plan to go with a Cantonese speaker!

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Here's the thing. I LOVE food, but I'm not a 'foodie'. If it doesn't taste awful or too ridiculously bland, I'll just eat it and say it was a nice meal. I'm not going to write reviews of restaurants because there are enough people out there on Foursquare etc who have already done this and can do it far better than me. I'm just going to write where I've eaten, and any comments I have about the restaurant.

Veggie Dinners - Veggie SF

At our Welcoming Dinner on Friday of last week I met quite a few other 'vegetarians' seated at the "Vegetarian Table". People included Jewish Tal from North Carolina, lactose-intolerant seafood-allergic Swede Vero, lacto-ovo vegetarian Swede Emilia, plus a few other people (I distinctly remember two Marys...). Last night Emilia, Vero, myself, Maria (another Swede I met for the first time that night) and John (who never likes to miss out on a dinner invitation!) went to Veggie SF, a vegetarian/vegan restaurant in Central.

L-R Vero, John, Emilia

The decor was 50's America. The owners subscribed to the 'more is more' philosophy regarding antiques and decorative ornaments.

The SF in the name stands for San Francisco. On their website Veggie SF write

"Having worked in this (Hong Kong) bustling city, we understand the work environment can be very stressful. With this in mind, we provide our customers with a good selection of inspirational readings where one can refresh and rejuvenate the mind"

For example:

Here's a picture of Millie getting excited about the chocolate cake (it was pretty good!)

We also had Pomelo ice-cream, which was a very small serving - read: one scoop - but quite tasty. I spent about 10 minutes on my phone trying to find out what a 'pomelo' was after receiving conflicting answers of 'its a pomegranate', 'its a big citrus fruit', 'its a type of melon'. Answer: Pomelo is the largest citrus fruit. A pomegranate is something entirely different. It is not a melon.

And as we were leaving the restaurant, this lovely vintage portrait of the San Francisco trams caught my eye, and John kindly took a photo for me.

May there be many more exciting vegetarian adventures to come!

First Impressions

Hello Hong Kong! I like you already.

We were told via the IASP e-newsletter a few weeks ago that we should travel from HK Airport to CUHK by taxi (it would be quite inconvenient to other passengers to travel on the MTX if we had lots of luggage, which is understandable), and that it would be about $300HKD. My taxi driver spoke almost no English, but had a cute figurine in his car.

The green taxis on the right as you exit HK Airport go to the New Territories. Happy point #1: The fare to my actual hostel - like to the door - was less than $220!
Drawback... I arrived right at the start of the lunch hour break for the Morningside College Office >_< (They are closed between 1 and 2pm) so I just had lunch at the cafe in the Tower Block. Pasta, and a not-too-big-not-too-small can of Coke Zero.

Morningside College consists of two buildings: the Student Hostel/Tower Block/High Block (same building, different names), and the Maurice R. Greenberg building (they are only about 10m apart). Downstairs in the Tower Block there is the cafe, which has a lunch special every day (Wednesday is Mediterranean Pasta, which turned out to be carbonara, so I picked out all the bacon) and the lady working in the cafe is really nice. (She actually had  noticed I had picked out the bacon and said I should tell her next time and she would prepare something else. How nice!). The Maurice Building has the Office, Laundry, Dining Hall, and residential apartments.

Actually, that's one thing about HK - people are really nice and helpful (just a little pushy getting on and off the MTR, but that's a mirror of the manners on public transport in lost busy cities in north Asia I think!).

So, we were told to check in to our Hostel first, which I did - at 2pm when they opened again - and I received a key and some info about College rules.

This is my room!

The window is opposite the door, and my bed and desk are on the left when you enter the room.

As you can see, there is one wardrobe for two girls. Hmmmm. 

But the room is really new and clean and we have a beautiful view of the lake (river?), so when study gets too much, I can just look over the University grounds and the water. (The front haze in the photo is the flyscreen)

We had also been told in the e-newsletter that AFTER checking in to the hostel, to go to the I-Centre in Yasumoto International Academic Park. There is a free CUHK app for Android and iPhone which has a really useful map, so I used that to find my way from one place to the other. You have to be pretty on-the-ball to keep up with where to check-in and where to be, because there is no-one to hold your hand, but the whole registration process wasn't difficult - just follow what they tell you in the email. At the I-Centre I registered for my student Octopus card (transport card) and filled in some other paperwork, and bought a bedding set for $200. I then lugged it back to my dorm (uphill), where I met my roommate. She's lovely! Her name is Chloe, she is from Vancouver and she is studying Finance... and she only needs to do three subjects! (I'm very jealous).

Although we had been told in several previous emails that we would have a "local roommate who had expressed interest in sharing with an international student", this is not true as a rule. Some people have local roommates, and some don't. Chloe's family is from China (near Shanghai) so she speaks fluent Mandarin and some Cantonese. Very convenient!

Last night I went out to dinner in Mong Kok with John and two of his friends from highschool (who are staying here in HK with family until the end of January; they study at Flinders University) and two of their friends. Hong Kong by night is amazing. Much older than Seoul, and lots more neon lights. We went down Nathan Road and Soy Street, and we had sushi at Hokkaido Katsu Sushi for dinner (order as much sushi as you like then pay by plate-number/plate-colour at the end) and a kind of iced-gelati for dessert. 

Afterwards John and I caught the train back to the University just before midnight. The train only takes about 20 minutes from the Uni to Mongkok! Excellent!

So, it was a brilliant first day! May there be many more like it ^_^