Boots in the Oven

Hightailing it straight out of Bangkok - to Kanchanaburi

Bangkok to Kanchanaburi, May 22, 2007

Things got a little sticky with the travel agent.  Turned out that we had to leave from Chiang Mai to go over to Vietnam a day earlier than we wanted to, or pay an additional $300, which we really really didn't want to do - so we elected to get out of Bangkok a day earlier than we had planned.

Unfortunately, we had to go by the travel agent at 3 to pick up our flight and train tickets before we could leave town. 

So we ate.

A noodle place on Soi Rambuttri provided a tasty brunch of pad thai (the second in two days) along with pad see-ew.  Lotsa savory noodles for us!

Husbear also went to grab a tasty-looking sausage from one of the other guys hanging out on the street.  It was tasty, but extremely sweet - a bit of a surprise for us.

Then we stopped and got pineapple juices.  I started to freak out about the ice, but... whatever. 

I suppose now is as good a time as any to get into a diatribe about Thai taxis?

They have meters.  Legally, the drivers have to use the meters.  Therefore, the drivers almost never will agree to use the meters.  Of course.

Also, they will often simply refuse your fare if they think there's too much traffic where you want to go or the place you want them to take you is too close.

So, whenever you want to take a taxi anywhere, you have to bargain and haggle and hope you don't have to be where you're going anytime soon, because even if you do find a taxi the traffic will be awful.

Also, sometimes you will go through the fun of finding a taxi, agreeing on the price, and getting into the taxi only to find out that your driver doesn't know where he's going, or that he wants to rebargain the fare for some reason.

Yeah.

I heart Farang, indeed.  (Farang is the Thai word for foreigner, and it's how you will hear yourself addressed ALL THE TIME.  If you want something spicy, say "Thai spicy, not farang spicy!"  If you don't understand something in a shop, you will hear lots of chatter liberally interspersed with the word Farang.)

Sometimes it made me want to do this.

We loved most of the Thai people we came in contact with, but almost all of the taxi drivers we had to deal with were infuriating.  Almost.

ANYWAY.  End of diatribe.

As soon as our tickets were ready, we grabbed them and our bags and haggled a 150 baht taxi over to the, I think Southern bus terminal (oddly in the northwest part of Bangkok) to catch a bus for Kanchanaburi and the River Kwai.  Two hours or so later, there we were, throwing our bags and ourselves into a modified pickup truck called a songthaew.

The truck got us quickly and safely to our hotel for the evening, the VN Guesthouse.  The guesthouse gives you the option of staying in a raft on the River Kwai (or Kway, as it's called in Thailand), and we jumped on it. 

You can also stay more cheaply in a room in the main building, up on the banks of the river.

The room itself was pretty barebones, but the view was so calming.

Except for the disco boat, though it only went by twice and was done before eight.  And was awesome.  We considered swimming out to it.

We got to enjoy our elephant beers while watching the bats skim over the surface of the water.

Then we went inside to try to figure out the toilet.  The step-by-step instructions were helpful.  I've never stayed in a hotel where you flush the toilet by pouring a bucket of water down it, and the thing I learned is - it really doesn't take that much water to flush a toilet!

Eventually, we started to get hungry.  Our original plan was to walk back to the area around the bus station, where we had seen a huge variety of streetfood when we arrived, but after walking past the war cemetery we realized this was a really long way to go.

We ducked into a place with their kitchen out on the street.  From the frontage, the place looked tiny, but once we got inside the true dimensions were revealed, along with a singer doing wonderful things to Beatles favorites.  (Hearing a Thai man phonetically sing the French in "Michelle" - can't be beat.)

They had an English menu, which was presented to us by four or five waitstaff who eagerly waited for our order.  We tried to fend them off by ordering beer, and one woman tried to explain that if we ordered Beer Chiang, we got something for free.  We didn't understand what it was, but learned quickly enough when it came to our table just behind the beers themselves.

A chicken foot soup with blood cake!

The waiter who put it down on our table told us that this was one of their best sellers, and we dug in.  It was delicious - just amazing.  The broth was thick with spices and rich with meaty flavor.  I couldn't (and still can't) get much of anything off chicken feet, but Husbear likes them.  The blood cake tasted a little like liver and a little of iron, and had a gelatinous texture that was actually really tasty in the soup.

After that... what to do?

Sour spicy beef salad.  Approximately the spiciest thing I have ever put in my mouth.  The flavors were intense and a revelation - balanced perfectly just below actual pain (No, there was definitely pain -L. Pants).

Not knowing what it was, we ordered the "serpent head salad."  We certainly weren't expecting a whole fish, expertly fried and topped with a raw salad of onion, peppers, carrots, cucumbers, and little unidentifiables.

With the exception of the yet-to-be-blogged Fat Duck, I don't think I've ever seen a restaurant meal make Husbear this happy. 

We did a pretty good job on all of the food, including the shrimp crackers that I didn't include a picture of.

Note to readers - beer does a very good job of washing the spicy out of your mouth, but careful not to be like Girlie and accidentally chug two large ones (at 7% abv) trying to eat the delicious food.  Temper with water.  Please.

The dynamos cooking in the kitchen were more than happy to allow us to take a photo while we were leaving.  Again, it's just mindblowing that such great food comes out of such barebones kitchens!

Husbear still rates this as the best restaurant we ate at in Southeast Asia, and we don't even know the name.  How stupid are we?  All I know is that it's south of the war cemetery on the southwest side of route 323, and I think it's before you get to Ban Nue Road.  Good luck.  We'll try to meet you there.

(Ok. I really don't think that's it's possible to describe just how awesomely delicious the food at this place was.  It was everything that I had been led to believe real Thai food is- sweet, salty, sour, a touch of bitter, aromatic herbs shoved in everything and spicy as all hell.  Small tears are running down my face even now as I think about it.  Unfortunately, this was not an experience that we were able to duplicate or even really approximate very often. Don't get me wrong, we had a lot of great food, but I often got the sense that my big white head doomed me to the tourist approved version more often than not.  In all seriousness though, when I get back to Thailand I will definately be spending a night or two in Kanchanaburi just to eat at this place as many times as possible in each 24 hour period. I may sleep on their floor.  -L. Pants)

(Oh and for the record, it's not like we forgot to look at the name or lost our notes or something- this place was bent on maintaining anonymity; no name on the menu, no signs, no embroidered napkins, nothing.  They did have a big banner with a crazy looking chicken on it with the website www.aomteenkai.com, but this just appears to be some sort of  business directory.  So if anyone can help, please, please, please tell us the name of this place. I have a tattoo artist on retainer, I just need the correct spelling.  Thanks)

Next day - The Bridge.  And a six-hour, non a/c bus ride to Sangkhlaburi.  Oops.

Bangkok - getting to know Khaosan Road and making onward plans

Bangkok, May 21, 2007

Good gawd, y'all.  The real-time blogging experiment, that went fairly well from southern Italy, sure did fail miserably when put to the test up against the heat and humidity and balls-to-the-walledness of Southeast Asia. 

We're back in the States, now, squatting with Husbear's wonderful folks in Mandeville, Louisiana.  There's ice in our drinks, dinners out are novelty-sized, and our cats were so happy to see us that they pooped in the tub.  (FATTY!)

Husbear's brother was happily married off on Saturday, and he and his lovely lady wife are down in Costa Rica right now on their honeymoon while we get to know their amazing bundle of three-year-old manchild.

But there's still blogging to do, while this trip is fresh in my mind!

First things first.  Since the place we originally checked in to in Bangkok's backpacker haven, Khao San Road, was filthy and disgusting, we had to find a new place to stay.  (Lesson - avoid the Siam Oriental if you're staying in that area.)  On the way, we were almost dragged bodily into one of Bangkok's approximately 73 trillion tailors.

We did want to get clothes made, just not immediately, and something about the name of this place really put us off...

We had some trouble finding it, but were soon checked into the hugely preferable Baan Sabai, off of Khaosan Road on a quieter street called Soi Rambuttri.  Bangkok is really difficult to navigate - the city appears to be completely unplanned.  Case in point - the fastest way to get from Khaosan Road to Soi Rambuttri is to cut through a felafel place, but you have to go upstairs through their internet cafe.  Huh?

A group of smily ladies were selling fruits in front of the Baan Sabai, and we slowed to buy one of their durians.  These fruits are revered by many Asians and hated by most Westerners.  Their smell is... pungent, to say the least, sort of blue cheesy and garlicky and ammoniac, and the best description we can give of the flavor is to liken it to a garlic walnut pudding. 

They taught us to say "Thank you!" in Thai and sent us on our way, giggling.

It was, at this point, well past lunchtime.  We had passed a small enclave of street stalls while we were looking for the Baan Sabai, and we went back to them for lunch.  We were too hungry to really do any comparison shopping, so we basically ended up at the first place to shove their menu at us, but we did have a pretty reasonable pad thai and a good tom yum goong (hot and spicy shrimp paste soup).

We had no idea what to do with the sugar the cook placed in front of us - I guess we telegraphed our confusion, since she came back and covered our noodles with sugar, chile, and lime juice.  Those three ingredients, plus fish sauce, can be found on every Thai table.  They make up the main components of Thai cuisine - hot, sweet, salty, and sour.

After lunch, we did several hours of comparison shopping at a few of the many, many travel agencies to be found in the area, trying to set up the next month of travel.  Apparently, it's almost always easier and cheaper to set up ongoing travel from Bangkok after you get there.  Visas are easier to obtain, air tickets are downright cheap, and train and bus travel doesn't make much sense before you get there.

Four hours or so later, and several hundred dollars poorer, we staggered out of our chosen travel agency.  We were to return the next day to pick up night train tickets to Chiang Mai for a date a few days down the road, as well as air tickets from Chiang Mai to Saigon and then back to Bangkok.  Pretty easy to take care of, though we had worked up an appetite...

A vendor of what we'd heard was a ubiquitous backpacker treat, the banana pancake, was frying up crepes right in front of the travel agent.  So we stopped.

She took a little knot of dough out of the metal container on the right, worked it into a large disk, and cooked it on the griddle.  Just before it was done, she sliced a banana, put the slices on the pancake, and folded the pancake around it; she then put a dab of bright yellow fat (coconut or palm oil?) underneath the pancake and fried it crispy.  Then, off the heat and topped with sweetened condensed milk!  A yummy, sweet treat.

We walked slowly up and down Soi Rambuttri, looking in shop windows at tailored suits, checking out used bookstores, and seeing what black-market DVD's were going to be played to an audience at the various guesthouses.  Across a major street, we saw this woman walking along with two panniers balanced across her back with a yoke.

A Thai woman stopped her in her walk, and she put down the panniers and started preparing her specialty.  Chilies and garlic went in, followed by sliced green bananas (peel on!), a handful of unfamiliar and very astringent green seeds, lemon slices (again, with peel), a whole small crab - seriously - dried prawns, and several sauces out of squeeze bottles and jars on her tray. Oh yeah, and a handfull of very tiny chilis.

We had to try it, so we ordered one.  The five-minute sequence of pounding and stirring began anew.  She handed us our styrofoam container of green banana salad, and we tasted it... it was like a huge condiment.  Very spicy, sour, shrimpy, and STRONG.  I guess the Thais aren't afraid of strong flavors...

We had to sit down somewhere and get a Beer Chiang (Elephant Beer) to wash it down. 

We weren't able to finish the green banana salad - honestly, it was just too overly astringently powerful for us!  So we watchedthe backpackers go by, and when the sun went down, we returned to the Baan Sabai and changed for dinner.

We were going to do dinner at a place nearby called Hemlock, recommended by Mia at Nosh, an amazing person who sent us an insanely helpful document she typed up with information from her travels to Thailand in February.

The restaurant turned out to be very nice, with somewhat odd artwork on the walls for sale and a yooge menu.  We ordered the Miang Kam, which the menu described as dried prawn wrapped in tea leaf.  It turned out to be a beautiful presentation and couldn't have been simpler - leaves, and raw chopped onion, lime pieces with the peel, dried shrimplets, peanuts, toasted coconut, and chiles.  Fresh, and light, and delicious.

We also orderded a vegetarian jungle curry with tofu, which was flavored with lots and lots of fresh peppercorns and full of bitterly strange little pods of something. (We later discovered that these little balls were called pea eggplants and people love to throw them in almost every type of curry.)

We also ordered Rhoum, which from the description I thought would be like a Scottish fried egg - but stuffed with prawn and chicken in lieu of sausage.  Instead:

Seriously filling dinner.  Looking back at these pictures, it looks like all we did our first day in Bangkok was eat, but that's just because we didn't take any shopping pictures.  Ah well.

On to Cowboy!

Soi Cowboy is an area of a certain... flavor, shall we say, that has a history stretching back 50 years or so.  It started as an area where GI's went to blow off steam.  Now, it's full of expensive strip clubs where ladies do anatomically improbable things that I won't go in to here. 

I will say that I was most impressed by the 30 or so darts fired by one woman and leave it at that.  And no, you can't take pictures inside any of the establishments...

We were out rather late.  Next day, on to the River Kwai.

girlie

It’s our last day in Hong Kong! Market, anyone?

Hong Kong, May 20, 2007

With our flight to Bangkok not leaving until 10:30 at night, we had just about a whole day to spend in Hong Kong.

First? Yeah, last day in HK = last day of dim sum! On to a sorta fancy place called “Chao Inn.” I don’t know if the pun translates into Cantonese. Not that it’s much of a pun…

Anyway, we spent several minutes perusing the huge menu, marking off the various things we wanted and making a couple of educated guesses. Husbear really wanted to order the “something something something XO something” – XO sauce is a popular spicy sauce made from dried scallops and chilies, among other things – so we figured, what the heck.

I think we were both a little surprised at the sheer volume of what was laid down in front of us. The something XO proved to be delicious cakes of fried… potato? in that yummy spicy sauce. We also got turnip cakes studded with bits of ham (yum), Japanese-style eggplant layered with pork and topped with bonito flakes and a delicate broth-based sauce, strange sort of dry tubes of dough stuffed with pork and glutinous rice, a “dumpling of blessings” made of rice wrapped in banana leaves with something unidentifiably eggy and beany and not particularly delicious in the middle, steamed spareribs in black bean sauce (which were good, though sort of gummy) and the house mixed dumplings, which tasted like steamed cake batter. Husbear’s favorite.

A little overwhelming? Yeah. That look on Husbear’s face is pure shock, I think.

Next step? Taking the MTR to see the market at Graham Street. The MTR is crazy new-looking, and has some terrific advertisements. This one, which we saw everywhere, is my favorite. I didn’t know that offering to bless your family was such a big con game in Hong Kong!

The market basically takes up both sides of an extremely narrow street that runs uphill fairly steeply. You’re dodging people and umbrellas (because it’s raining, of course, unless that’s just our luck) and out of the corner of your eye you see this. Warning: not for the particularly squeamish!

Here, they actually cut the fish so that its heart continues to beat after it’s been filleted. So the fish is as fresh as it can be, you see. Yowch.

We were back in fairly familiar territory with the pig parts, though.

Here’s a sign that Husbear wants to buy from the proprietor. Barring that, he plans to take it and stick it in his backpack.

The market’s actually not all that big, so we finished fairly quickly and set to walking the streets of an area we hadn’t visited. You know they drive on the wrong side of the street in Hong Kong, too?

The street we walked up was full of art galleries and reproduction antiques and whole carved mammoth tusks. Really, whole carved mammoth tusks. They were unbelievable, and truly difficult to photograph effectively – especially because most of the stores had signs up in the window requesting passersby abstain from photography. Poot.

So we went to a temple, where we displayed shocking ignorance once more. I think we didn’t offend anyone by doing anything stupid, but I can’t be certain.

This is the Man Mo temple, built in the 18th century to worship two deities – one, a 3rd-century Chinese statesman, and the other a 2nd-century soldier who is now the god of war. We couldn’t believe the amount of incense burning on the inside – we were told that these coils can burn up to a week.

Moving on (and quickly, since I just about fainted from all the incense), we found ourselves on a street selling bird’s nest and shark’s fin. These two oddities are considered delicacies by the Chinese, who go to enormous lengths and pay thousands of dollars to procure them.

The bird’s nest, I don’t have too much of a problem with, but I really dislike the idea of shark’s-fin soup – the fact that each of those fins represents an entire shark (and that the practice used to be throwing the shark back in the water after cutting off its dorsal fin, leaving it to suffocate slowly) is rather upsetting.

Dried squid’s ok by me, though. Even if it usually tastes like chewing on paper that’s been in a fishtank.

And dried scallops are downright tasty, especially when they’re put into that yummy XO sauce.

After getting a little lost in the tangle of walkways across downtown Hong Kong, we eventually found the MTR again and refrained from spitting on the platform.

Our destination was the Museum of Teaware, where we bought ourselves a tiny souvenir. The park is really nice – a great spot of green in the middle of the city. We surprised a young couple having their wedding pictures taken.

Back in the area around our hotel, we stopped in a hilarious facsimile of a British pub, serving such treats as bangers and mash or chicken foot soup. But they had a/c and cold beer.

For dinner a little bit later, we went to a Japanese restaurant around the corner from our hotel, where we got a hugely delicious seaweed salad,

and eel on rice with pickles (a favorite of mine), along with a couple of skewers of grilled chicken parts. Very good, and reasonably priced.

We went back to the hotel to collect our bags, which had been sitting in a hallway for hours unmolested, and went to wait for the bus to the airport. I had a freakout because we were running fairly late, and when we got to the airport it turned out that Emirates is one of only two airlines that operate out of the old terminal in Hong Kong, so we had to get back on a bus…but of course everything worked out just fine in the end.

We even got to see this guy and his strange fashion choice. The socks, of course.

Emirates was totally delightful. We got to watch Scrubs and the Simpsons, and we got fed some actually delicious airline food (I had a panfried seabass fillet with a leek and mustard cream sauce and an amazing tomato concassé, for reals, and Husbear had the stir-fried chicken with ginger, spring onions, and oyster sauce).

Arrival into Bangkok just after midnight was much less scary than I had been led to believe. Immigration took less than a half-hour, and we had no troubles getting an official taxi with a very happy and friendly driver to take us by meter to Khao San Road, Bangkok’s backpacker central.

It was in the finding of our hotel that we had some trouble – actually, we weren’t sure where stupid Khaosan Road was, until a friendly Thai guy got us turned around and headed in the right direction. The hotel we had booked was pretty gross, with a beetle doing laps in the toilet and a line of ants marching across the wall… but it was 3 in the morning, and we were in no mood to argue. We just booked one night and went downstairs for a beer to calm our jangly nerves before bed (and we hoped it might allow us to fall asleep even with the bugs). Our view with our beers:

Let’s hope the street looks a little prettier in the morning…

From British to Portuguese – Day Trip to Macau

May 19th, 2007

So, I think I’ve reached the conclusion that real-time blogging from Southeast Asia is pretty much impossible, at least if you want to do any travel or see the places you’re visiting.. Oh well.

We had an email from our friend Tiffany telling us that her favorite part of her visit to Hong Kong was her trip to Macau. After hearing that, there was nothing for it but to hop a ferry over to the former Portuguese territory!

But first, more dumplings and fried bits and noodles and tea. Dim sum, that is.

We got spring rolls and potstickers (not as good as those at the ripoff Shanghai chicken place the night before, but quite good) and glutinous rice rolls and more steamed barbequed pork buns and some stirfried noodles. All for 60 Hong Kong dollars, which is about 8 USD. We LOVED dim sum.

We then took the very shiny high-tech fast wonderful subway to the ferry terminus for Macau, only to find out that they were all sold out until 1 PM. So we bought Starbucks coffee (our first ones in… well, over a year, at least), which were seriously disgusting, and waited out the time until our ferry left.

Arrival in Macau at 2 was WET. Even the rickshaw drivers had sought cover, which is pretty impressive since they’re always angling for customers, at least in Vietnam and Thailand.

Since it was pouring, we hedged our bets and smiled our way on to one of the buses channeling gamblers back and forth to the Grand Hotel Lisboa, one of the nicest of Macau’s many casinos. It was midafternoon and time for a snack, and the casino had a little place they were advertising called the “Noodle and Congee Corner.” I was expecting a diner-like old Vegas style place, but we arrived to an extremely well-designed little restaurant tucked away a floor above the gambling.

The place had a huge open kitchen where seriously talented people were making like six different kinds of noodles. There were pulled noodles and noodles cut off a board into boiling water and these guys, which were thrown theatrically from several feet back into a wok. Totally amazing.

Their menu was huge, but we eventually settled on an order of lah mien (the pulled noodles) with chicken and sea cucumber, along with Shanghai soup dumplings, a fried pancake with pork and cilantro, and a steamed pancake filled with fried bean curd sheets, pork, and cucumber.

These were all impressive (especially the soup dumplings, which burst with gingery brothy goodness – how they get soup into these dumplings, I can’t imagine) but the tea service was the most insane I’ve ever seen. We were given teacups filled with our oolong and osmanthus tea, and right behind was this guy with a teapot that had what must have been a three foot spout. He flipped the pot of boiling water over his back and poured with quick robotic movements, somehow managing not to spill a drop. We were too flabbergasted to take a picture, but we got one when he went to another table.

Their regular dumplings were too good not to try any dessert dumplings (plus, we didn’t want to go out in the rain), so we ordered a glutinous rice pancake with red bean paste and rice dumplings stuffed with magma. I mean black sesame paste. They were really hot.

After this decadent dumpling and noodle extravaganza (maybe they need a better name than the “noodle and congee corner”?) we decided to chance the weather. One two-dollar umbrella richer, we made our way into the drizzle.

Macau feels a lot older than Hong Kong. They haven’t torn down all of their old buildings, and many of the streets are paved with striking mosaics.

On our way to visit the ruins of the church of St. Paul, we walked down a narrow little lane lined on both sides by candied meat sellers. They were giving out samples, and we tried a little of the candied pork – which was very strange. Sweet and a little meaty, with a texture a lot like jerky and a flavor a little like breakfast cereal. But meaty. Hard to describe.

We grabbed one of Macau’s famous egg custard tarts, which probably would have been better if we hadn’t just eaten 73 dumplings. I think some nice tea would have helped it out, too, as it was also really sweet.

The ruins of the church of St. Paul are one of the major tourist sights in Macau. It’s the façade of a Jesuit church finished in the early 17th century, and it makes for an incongruous sight in this overall very Chinese town.

(Husbear snapped this picture and told me to “do something interesting.” I’m a terrible improviser.)

We followed the Lonely Planet walk down towards the waterfront, making a stop to shop for some gold. Golden Mao, anyone?

No? Well, how about a golden pig necklace suckling little golden piglets? I’ve become obsessed with the awesome pig statues and jewelry that we’ve seen everywhere, but I can’t actually justify buying it – so instead I’ve started a collection of pictures of pigs. What do you think?

The walk down to the water was interesting, with lots of food to look at (and not buy) and neat little shops for window-shopping. And bamboo scaffolding everywhere – now we know why Jackie Chan does tricks on bamboo scaffolding in all of his movies.

The walk ended at the A-Ma temple, which we couldn’t actually enter. Geckoes and gnats were everywhere, and incense made the hot night air heavy.

Our walk back to the Grand Hotel Lisboa (and their free port shuttle) took us to very modern, neon-lit new casino-stuffed Macau. So different from the back lanes.

So, that’s it for Macau and its odd and wonderful blend of Chinese and Portuguese.

Late night, back in Hong Kong, we treated ourselves to a meal of simple, plain food and went back to our hotel.

The next day we’d be flying to Bangkok, and my nerves were wound tight. What kind of guidebook says to spend the night in the airport if you arrive after dark? Ah, yes – First-Time Asia. Those crazy bastards, scaring people for no reason.

HCMC, June 4, 2007

Exploring Hong Kong – it’s all modern. Birds and bazaars.

May 18, 2007 (written in Chiang Mai, May 28, 2007)

After sleeping off some of our jet lag, we got up the next morning and started off for our first dim sum experience. The East Lake Seafood Restaurant was in another huge office block a couple of streets down from our hotel. I’m mystified as to how you know which restaurants are any good in Hong Kong, because the vast majority of them are hidden on like the 5th floor of these huge buildings. To find a lot of the best places, you really have to have a recommendation or some idea already of where you’re going.

Anyway, we sat down in the huge room that makes up the East Lake Seafood Restaurant, feeling distinctly like tourists having wandered into some hotel ballroom full of dining conventioneers. East Lake had a much-abbreviated English menu, which we accepted gratefully (our Cantonese isn’t really up to snuff), and pot of tea was plunked down on our table along with a pot of hot water.

I saw several things on the menu I was curious to try, so we ordered a slew of dumplings and small treats and placed a Kleenex on our laps.

Husbear went to explore a table we saw over in the corner, where it appeared you could get fried wontons with honey (which we did, of course), and by the time he got back small steamers had started to appear on our table.

First to arrive were fried bean curd rolls stuffed with shrimp, along with steamed buns filled with barbequed pork. The rolls were good, though seriously greasy, and the steamed buns were nice – light, fluffy, steamy, but with only a little very sweet pork filling.

Next came the ubiquitous siu-mai, open-topped dumplings stuffed with shrimp and pork. These were good, savory and with a good chew. Perhaps a little bland, if I was being picky – some might prefer to call their taste “subtle.”

We also got some tender gingery steamed beef meatballs and an order of chicken feet in black bean sauce. Husbear was heartened to see the Hong Kong method of eating these – put a big chunk in your mouth, chew, and spit out the bones. Otherwise, they’re really hard to pick clean. He pronounced them delicious. I still think they’re an awful lot of work for not very much meat.

We were pretty stuffed, so we took the subway (MRT) to the center of town and started out on a walking tour from our Lonely Planet. Our first stop, after being disappointed to find there are no remaining rickshaw drivers at the old port, was at Hong Kong’s Statue Square. Most of Hong Kong’s colonial history has been bulldozed under to make way for shiny new buildings, but the Legislative Council building remains (with a tower in the background designed by I.M. Pei).

It’s not a very old building, having been built in 1912. According to our book, during World War Two it was the headquarters for the Japanese version of the Gestapo and was the site of many executions.

Statue Square is pretty heavily regulated, like most of Hong Kong. The loss of the food hawkers is the saddest to me, of course. Mobile food stands are everywhere here in Thailand, but there aren’t very many in Hong Kong – the authorities were afraid that the pressurized gas canisters (used for cooking) might be a little on the unsafe side.

We stopped into the I.M. Pei building, the Bank of China Tower, to check out their observation windows on the 43rd floor. We did snap a nice view of the bay and the enormity of modern Hong Kong,

as well as a reverse shot up the hill that makes up the back end of Hong Kong. The fact that many people lived in the apartment towers up this steep hill and worked down in the bay has led to an interesting solution that we took pictures of later. (You’ll have to wait.)

The elevator itself gave us another reminder of the germ-phobic Hong Kongers. They’ve been completely freaked out by avian flu, and have shut down the main market in town. There’s disinfectant carpet everywhere along with signs telling you to always wash your hands and that spitting spreads germs.

Outside, we walked along the streets of Central, taking in the huge streets and the glass and steel buildings. Here’s some double-decker transport, like I talked about yesterday.

We found the Hong Kong Park, a huge splotch of green in the middle of all of the tall buildings. It definitely took some of the heat out of the day to be in a place with waterfalls and plants. People milled about, slowly enjoying the park.

Since we have less than no idea about Chinese tea, we went into the Flagstaff House Museum of Teaware on the park grounds. It’s in a colonial building built in 1846, which makes it the oldest colonial building in Hong Kong still standing in its original location. (See – not too much colonial history left.) The exhibitions were really interesting and informative (and the a/c was quite welcome). There were old traditionally shaped teapots for different types of tea, along with information on the methods that have arisen through the ages to serve each type of tea.

We also saw the results of a competition to design artistic working teapots. Some of the specimens were amazing.

Having cooled down a little bit, we left the museum and headed over to the aviary, a large space full of birds enclosed by a net. It’s covered in signs warning you to thoroughly wash your hands if you come into contact with the birds or their droppings, as well as a friendly exhortation to avoid dengue fever. Which is a disease that does NOT sound like fun – perhaps it’s the name?

The aviary was terrific. Wooden pathways set 10 meters in the air wind through trees filled with singing and chirping birds, all of them native to Southeast Asia and many of them very, very colorful.

The buildings rising up outside the net enclosure remind you that you’re in the middle of a huge city – otherwise you might be tempted to forget, it’s that peaceful

By far the most common bird we saw were these guys, a sexy version of a pigeon. I can’t remember if they’re called imperial pigeons or emperor pigeons, but they definitely looked dignified and royal in their green feathered cloaks.

We also saw these black-capped lories playing around in a tree, flipping around each other – I think happily. Or perhaps they were trying to kill each other. I’m no ornithologist.

At this point, we were starting to get hungry (it had been like three hours since dim sum breakfast!) so we walked into a place that had a bubbling pot of tripe and tofu in the window as well as honeycomb tripe hanging up on meathooks.

Stupidly, we didn’t order tripe, at least directly, though I’m fairly certain the two dumplings we did order had more than their fair share of organ meats.

Then, we were off to see the solution to the steep Hong Kong commute – the longest escalator in the WORLD! Awesome. I was a little sad that it wasn’t continuous, though I guess that would be sort of difficult to maintain. It’s three moving walkways and 20 escalators and it’s 800 meters long, or almost half a mile.

It only runs one direction at a time – down in the morning and up in the evening. Luckily, it was going up when we wanted to take it, or it would have been a hot slog up lots of stairs.

Aside – want some Pizza Hut? Why is there no pizza on this Pizza Hut ad? Hrm?

After our explorations of the escalator, we went back to our guesthouse, did some blogging, and washed up – then out again, to the flower market! Where it started raining, just like it had done every day in London. Oh well… I guess some vacations are like that.

There were stores that specialized in one type of flower, like orchids or roses, as well as shops that made bouquets and centerpieces. It was blocks long and full of beautiful color.

Turning a corner at the end of the flower market, we discovered a street where people sold fish in small bags clipped to the front of their stores.

I’m really not sure what the deal is with these, but there certainly were a lot of them – along with places with crabs in bags and tiny turtles in tanks.

Having puzzled at the fish and sea creatures, we walked over to the Temple Street night market where we were hoping to get some dinner. (Yeah, time to eat again.) People sat under tents with designer catalogs out, saying “You want copy watch? Copy purse?” It didn’t seem like the best idea, so we kept walking.

This stand, with its enormous selection of eating things, jumped out at us – this seems to be the best and easiest way for an illiterate traveler to eat in Hong Kong, since everything is just there right in front of you, ameliorating the guesswork.

but what was going on at the very end of it intrigued me the most. I knew I’d seen these little frypans before… and then I remembered, takoyaki! They’re Japanese dumplings with breading mixed liberally with finely chopped octopus. I guess there are some places in Osaka (where they’re most beloved, if I remember correctly) where you can even fry them at your table. I had to give them a try.

Honestly, I was a little thrown by the liberal dousing with mayonnaise and eel sauce and seaweed, but hey, when in Hong Kong… eat Japanese food? They were completely awesome, but would probably have been even better straight out of the fryer with a cold beverage.

Having snacked, it was time for dinner… and a bathroom, so we went into a little hole in the wall advertising Shanghai fried chicken. We were drawn in mostly by this guy in the window making a huge array of dumplings, and we were able by using hand gestures to get an order of THE BEST POTSTICKERS I HAVE EVER EATEN (there IS need to shout about these, trust me) along with the strangest fried chicken.

Seems like most of Asia doesn’t really care so much about the delicate jointing and boning in a piece of meat (the stuff they obsess about in France) and so what we got were various parts of chicken that had been deep fried and then hacked apart by a cleaver. Bone shards were everywhere. The flavor was good, but the highlight was the soy sauce based dipping sauce.

Then the restaurant tried to overcharge us by like 40 Hong Kong dollars. Always check your ticket, people!

Then we ate dumplings on a stick from a place remarkably similar to the takoyaki joint. I love dumplings, and if you can put them on a stick, I’m that much happier.

Husbear had been seeing this strange looking waffle item on the tables at a lot of the snacketerias, so he ordered one from the dumpling on a stick ladies. Since we didn’t know if it was sweet or savory, he asked if he should douse it with some of the selection of dipping sauces on the ladies’ table. “Sauce?” he asked, gesturing at the waffle-thing. They said “Sauce!” but then when he made the move to put something on the waffle they both burst out laughing. “SAUCE! HAHAHA!” And we all had a good laugh together. Maybe sauce means something different in Cantonese or Mandarin?

Turned out the waffle thing was coconut flavored and sweet and probably would have been quite strange covered in fish or chili sauce. So. A yummy snack.

A question to end the day – how would you like to be seen exiting the HONG KONG HAEMORRHOID CENTRE? Well?