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 - Bangkok Thai Restaurant

We haven't had an official Veggie Dinner for a few weeks due to most of us being away for the two Fridays either end of Lunar New Year, and then several people were away in Taiwan last week for the Lantern Festival. I am yet to make it to Taiwan, but flights are cheap and frequent, and it takes only about 1.5 hours to get there.

On Friday we had planned to go to Shanghai Vegetarian in Sha Tin because their food is excellent - noodles,  stews, and the best assortment of vegetarian dumplings and dim sum I have found so far in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, there were eight of us for dinner that night and we hadn't made a reservation, so we had to wait. The host recommended (in Cantonese, Victoria translated for us) that we split into two tables of four, then the wait would be shorter. Note that the wait for restaurants, especially in places like Sha Tin's New Town Plaza, can be anywhere between 5 minutes and an hour. However, I am yet to have a disappointing meal (except for when I ordered a margherita pizza from Shakey's Pizza - thin dry crust, tasteless cheese, just THREE cherry tomatoes that had been halved and randomly scattered, and a sprinking of chopped dried basil that looked like it came straight out of a Masterfoods shaker). I hate cooking, there are very few vegetarian options available for dinner on campus (outside the meal plans for places like Morningside College and S.H. Ho College) so eating at restaurants is my best bet for a stress-free meal.

So in the end, we made the executive decision not to be split up, so we investigated a few other places (the 7th floor of New Town Plaza is ALL restaurants) and ended up at Bangkok Thai Restaurant at a huge table with a lazy susan. We had lovely Victoria (from Georgetown University I think....) order for us because the menu doesn't necessarily tell you if the meal or the stock is beef or fish based - bad for the vegetarians and bad for Vero, who is highly allergic to seafood and dairy. 

I will say this: It is not difficult being vegetarian, vegan, or having special dietary requirements in Hong Kong, its just that when you go to restaurants, you ABSOLUTELY MUST have someone who speaks Cantonese to be able to talk with the waiters about what is in the meals.

Basically, the food was excellent. We had two kinds of curries, a vegetable stew, a papaya salad, vegetarian pad thai, and each of us had a bowl of rice - six dishes was just perfect to fill the bellies of 8 hungry girls.

Most of us also had drinks. In the picture I had the Iced Coconut Juice, and Vero had the (very gingery) Lemongrass Ginger Tea. Splitting the bill meant that we each paid $112 - definitely worth it for the delicious dinner we had!

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.

Tai O and the Big Buddha

Today IASP had organised for us a tour to Lantau Island to visit Tai O village and to have a vegetarian lunch at the Po Lin Monastery. We had to meet at the Pi Chu Building at Central Campus (a 10 minute walk from my dorm) at 9am, which was not so easy for a Saturday morning. All the tours organised so far have used consistently nice coach buses (sometimes the air-conditioning can make the bus resemble Antarctica) but this time our tour guide talked REALLY loudly on her microphone the whole 1.5 hour trip to Tai O (our first stop) so only the very determined managed to catch up on some sleep.

Some things I learned from Hilary-the-tour-guide's LOUD talking.

1. Lantau Island is where the Hong Kong Airport is, and where the world's smallest Disneyland is (actually, I knew this already. Actually, we all knew this already. Tour guides just like to remind us.) 

2. Hong Kong comprises 236 islands - Lantau is the largest (which I found surprising because I thought Hong Kong Island was the largest... but I was wrong)

3. Statues of the Buddha have him with one hand facing palm outward (like waving 'hello') which means "do not fear", and the other resting on the knee with palm up meaning "peace to all the people of the world".

4. There is only one bridge going to Lantau Island, and even the Airport Express has its own area of the bridge. If there is a typhoon, the upper level of the bridge is closed (because cars can get damaged) and only the lower level is open. If the typhoon is category 10, then the whole bridge is closed and the only way to the airport is on the train!

Tai O is a tiny tiny fishing village on the west coast of Lantau Island. Here are some photos.

The residential area of Tai O, where people live in houses on stilts because they feel closer to the sea (says Hilary)

Korean Megan (민경) who is also my neighbour at Morningside, and Finnish Katrin.

We had about an hour and an half to look around, so we did, but didn't buy much. There was a lot of live seafood, and a lot of dried seafood, and a lot of pickled seafood... you get the idea.

Trying to be artistic, I took this photo because I liked the contrast of the 50s-style glass engraving on the window as contrasted against the iron sheets.

While walking through the market I heard some distinctly French piano-accordion music, and when we investigated we found a cafe - "Cafe Solo" 86 Kat Hing Front, Tai O - with some tables looking over the water.

I had the red bean and green tea cake, and Katrin had the cheesecake.

The view from the cafe. Because Chinese New Year is in less than two weeks time, there are red lanterns and red banners everywhere.

After Tai-O we got back on the bus to go to have our lunch at the Po Lin Buddhist Monastery. It was quite nice - typical banquet-style vegetarian Chinese food, but with circular tables of about 12 people and no lazy susan in the middle to move the food around, it was kind of awkward. 

At the monastery there is the Big Buddha.

And yes, I did walk all the way up there, but I don't have any good photos closer to the Buddha because the sun was behind the statue.

This is one of the six smaller statues facing the Big Buddha.

There is a 3-level exhibition hall inside the Big Buddha, and many old doors leading inside that are no-longer used.

Although there was a ton of people all visiting the Buddha, sometimes you get lucky and get a photo that makes it look like you are the only one there. (Thank you Megan!)

By 3pm we were all exhausted, and thankfully Hilary didn't talk on the bus on the way back to the University. Most of us slept.

So, although it was a little touristy, I did enjoy today's excursion. I also highly recommend that if you do want to go to Tai O and the Monastery, go with a tour because the area is really isolated and there isn't much public transport.

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.

Burns Night

There is a tradition at Morningside College of holding a 'Burns Night' in honor of Scottish poet Robert Burns during the week of his birthday. Last night, Master of the College and Head Scot, Professor Sir James Mirrlees read Selkirk Grace (with a beautiful Scottish lilt) before an Asian man in a kilt playing the bagpipes performed the "Piping-in of the Haggis". Seriously. The bagpipes were played, and the haggis was rolled in on a silver platter by the chef. (Well done to John for capturing the moment, as it all happened so fast!)

An extract from the Address to the Haggis was then read, then we toasted the Haggis. Then we ate the haggis (with mushed carrot and mushed potato-cauliflour).

Well, most people did. They also served fish with vegetables, plus the table staples of rice and soup (last night was regular Asian-style chicken soup. More on irregular Asian-style chicken soup to come!)

For the third out of four nights my vegetarian meal was... pasta! But sadly it was not Scottish-themed. So far I've had spaghetti in napoletana sauce, spirali in yellow curry (that was interesting) and penne in napoletana-with-broccoli-and-carrot-chunks. I'm not complaining. The serving is huge and my food is never cold (unlike some of the regular meals that can take a while to get to your table and become cold in the process).

We also had two of the resident professors give speeches - Professor Simon Haines spoke of Robert Burns and his achievements (both literary and... extra-curricular) and Professor Colin Graham - who actually grew up 8 miles from Burns' hometown - read To a Mouse. We were given a program:

And in the program there was a copy of the poem in its original form (as it was read on the night), plus a "Standard English Translation".
Anyone who has ever read Burns and tried to figure out what 'skeekit', 'whyles', 'daimen' and 'cranreuch' means will appreciate the gesture.

We then all stood up and sang Auld Lang Syne (again, the verses were in the program, and some of us sang more heartily than others!) then it was trifle for dessert.

I thought the whole occasion was thoroughly enjoyable! The case for Morningside College being the best of the residential colleges is, in my opinion, getting stronger by the day... but I won't give my final analysis until I've lived here for at least one month.

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!