Breakfast

Hong Kong breakfast is what I crave, and a lot of it is simple enough to make at home without too much effort with the exception of Dim Sum.

These are all Dim Sum dishes, typically cooked by steaming. On the bottom left, there is Shaomai, which is a dumpling containing pork and shrimp. This particular variety is what is most well known in English speaking countries, and actually has its roots in Inner Mongolia. Clockwise (ignoring the half eaten dish) is steamed ribs in black bean sauce. Top right is either a Chiu Chow dumpling or a chive dumpling, but they are both similar in that they both contain vegetables, fungus, and sometimes pork. Bottom right is a shrimp dumpling. Bottom middle is a steamed meatball. It contains beef and water chestnut and other seasonings and is served with Worcestershire sauce.

Another classic in Dim Sum – this are steamed rice rolls. The white part is made of a wide strip of rice noodle usually with filling from shrimp, pork, or beef, and the sauce on top is soy sauce.

The sight of chicken feet as something edible frequently scares foreigners. Rather than just calling it chicken feet, it’s commonly known as Phoenix Claw. It’s prepared via a complicated process of frying, braising, simmering, and steaming – one of the most difficult Dim Sum dishes to make.

The top left is the usual eggs, ham, and bread (in this case garlic bread).  The middle is Satay Beef Noodles.  Satay refers to cooking meat with a spicy, sweet, peanut sauce that originated from Indonesia.  The noodles in the picture are just rice noodles, but it doesn’t have to be.  The top right drink is Hong Kong style milk tea.  It’s similar to the British style of black tea with milk and sugar except that the Hong Kong variant uses condensed or evaporated milk – I would drink this over coffee any day of the week.

This is a pineapple bun with a slab of butter inside it (the bun is served warm so the butter slowly melts inside of it). The bun doesn’t actually contain pineapple, but it the crunchy top can sometimes resemble a pineapple. The bun itself tastes like a regular bun, but the top adds a slight sweet flavour, and of course there’s the flavour of melted butter.

The bowl of noodles is just regular instant ramen noodles (typically Nissin 出前一丁 noodles) in the restaurant’s own soup with a deboned chicken drumstick. This dish is often served with fried eggs and Spam instead of chicken.  The drink to the right is Horlicks, a malted milk drink. It’s often associated as a kid’s drink, but still enjoyed by adults.

The dish on the left is macaroni in chicken broth with ham slices. I ate this a lot growing up and for some strange reason a lot of non-Asian people I’ve explained this dish to think it’s gross. The dish on the right is the typical egg, sausage, and toast, and the drink up top is milk tea.

Congee is a popular breakfast dish and it’s common to add all sorts of different ingredients like fish, chicken, pork, Chinese doughnut, etc. The one above is congee with Chinese doughnut, fish balls, beef balls, and peanuts. Another popular one has lean pork and century egg.

Lunch/dinner

Food is cheap enough in Hong Kong such that people are okay with buying food everyday rather than cooking at home!

Hotpot is probably my favourite. Take a broth (beef, chicken, fish, spicy, or whatever) and just cook whatever you want inside it. Traditionally, the entire table all share one giant pot and everyone cooks their food inside it, but in recent times, having one small hotpot per person is becoming more popular.

These two dishes are classics in Hong Kong “Cha Chaan Teng” (茶餐廳) establishments. The one on the left is Baked Portuguese Chicken Rice. It’s not actually Portuguese and has its origins in Macau (just a ferry ride away from Hong Kong!), which was a Portuguese colony at the time. It’s essentially chicken and potatoes on top of fried rice in a creamy sauce with spices (e.g. turmeric, cumin, etc.), coconut milk, and chicken broth. The one on the right is Baked Pork Chop Rice. It’s baked in the same way as the previous one, but it’s fried pork chop and tomatoes on rice with a slightly sweet, cheesy, tomato sauce – one of my favourites. The drink is a lemon tea, which in this case it’s black tea with lemon slices and sugar.

The dish on the left is a roasted goose. It has the consistency of chicken, but has all dark meat and a more intense flavour than chicken. The dish on the right is poached chicken and roast pork belly on rice. Poached chicken might sound strange to some people, but it is actually quite flavourful if the brine is made well and the chicken is of high quality. The poached chicken is typically eaten with a sauce made of minced green onion, ginger, and oil. Roast pork belly is special mainly because of its thick crusty skin.

This is poached chicken and barbecue pork on rice. The poached chicken is the same as before and the barbecue pork is the same that is available in North America.

This is Claypot Rice. It’s essentially rice, meat, and soy sauce among other things all steamed together, but it doesn’t count unless there are crusty bits of rice on the side of the bowl formed from the steaming.

This is Wonton Noodles. The Wonton is the dumpling with shrimp and vegetables (one could argue that the above isn’t an actual wonton due to the shape of the dumpling, but let’s not get into technicalities), the noodles themselves are egg noodles cooked al dente, and the soup is usually derived from fish. The soup itself has flavour, but not so much so that it doesn’t overpower everything else.

These are also typical noodle dishes. The one of the left is beef brisket in a beef soup and the other is fish balls and fish tofu in a fish soup.

This is wonton noodles with beef balls. Good for a quick meal.

Some might tell you that the dirtier the place looks, the tastier it is.

Snacks

These are the street food style snacks. Huge ones that I’m missing here are bubble waffles and egg tarts unfortunately!

The bun on the right is the Pork Chop Bun, originally from Macau. It’s essentially a pork chop sandwiched in a Brazilian style bun (so-called piggy bun).

This looks like a dessert, but it’s actually served at some Cha Chaan Tengs. The white one is steamed milk pudding and the yellow one is steamed egg custard. It’s essentially milk or eggs with sweet flavouring (e.g. sugar, vanilla extract, etc.) that is steamed. It’s almost like a Hong Kong style crème brûlée.

This toast with butter and condensed milk. Very simple, but also very delicious.

These are fish balls. A lot of times they are made from processed fish, but can be made from fresh fish as well. Generally they are served a curry sauce, but they are also available in other types of sauces for people who can’t handle the spice.

The bowl of soup on the left is Imitation Shark Fin Soup. This has no actual shark fin in it, and instead the shark fin is replaced by clear rice noodles, since actual shark fin can sometimes have a similar consistency to it (to be honest, actual shark fin is rather tasteless). The key ingredients in the soup itself is chicken stock, chicken, various types of fungus, and dried scallops, and soy sauce. The dish on the right is Shaomai. Not to be confused with the kind at Dim Sum – this is the street food version, which is made of similar ingredients as the fish balls above.

Photo album: here

The weirdest part about boarding the plane: all the flight attendants just assumed I was Korean and spoke Korean to me, but changed to English for anyone that didn’t look Chinese/Japanese/Korean. I guess better to do that than to wrongly assume and speak English to actual Koreans. What’s cool about a Korean airline is that they serve Korean food like Bibimbap too. Oh, and they also asked me if I had a Samsung Galaxy Note 7. I guess that makes sense. Exploding plane… not good…

I arrived in Hanoi at night, and after a terrible night of jet lagged sleep, my adventure began.

Crossing the street on busy streets without traffic lights

Probably the biggest WTF moment I had was when I noticed that there are exactly zero traffic lights at intersections and there’s like a hundred people on mopeds crossing these intersections. People here are somehow magically able to weave through each other while crossing the intersection. People crossing the street just walk at a constant pace and just let the drivers drive around them.

The first time I crossed the street, it was like a giant leap of faith. As I’m crossing the street, I’m thinking “I wonder if this is what it feels like to know your life is about to end”. After I crossed, I thought, “Oh that wasn’t so bad”. But then there are like a dozen more intersections to cross before getting to the destination. After a while though, it definitely got easier.

There’s so many people here and the air pollution is epic

I thought I was used to large Asian cities (e.g. Hong Kong, Tokyo, etc.), but Hanoi is on a different level. The average population density of Hong Kong is about 6000 people/square km, but in Hanoi, it’s about 15000. For some reason though, it doesn’t seem like there are as many people walking around as in Hong Kong or Tokyo. Maybe it’s because they’re all driving their mopeds. It’s so crowded here that some people live in front of an unused railway track.

The streets are way less spacious too. People are always selling stuff on the side of the street, or people are parking their mopeds everywhere, so it makes it really hard to just walk in a straight line along the sidewalk. And as you’re walking, you’re constantly smelling exhaust.

Lots of cheap stuff

The street markets are often selling cheap knockoffs of things. People on the street were selling tons of North Face jackets. Apparently, they are made in Vietnam, but I have no idea whether or not the jackets here are real though, but they sure felt real. And they only cost $35 USD. I picked up two football jerseys for Bayern München and Borussia Dortmund for about $5 USD each. Dong Xuan market is another place selling tons of cheap stuff. Stores are tiny, but full of merchandise stacked up and the walkways are super narrow, but to our western standards, everything is super cheap. This is a city where a regular guy like me can walk into a Louis Vuitton store without being judged by all the people working there.

I almost bought this “Lepin” Millenium Falcon for $40 USD. The lady wouldn’t budge on her price =/.

On weekends, there’s a night market selling more cheap stuff.

They’ve got a really cool lake in the middle of the city

It was definitely the most scenic part of Hanoi that I went to.

On weekends afternoons and nights, everybody is going to Hoan Kiem Lake to hang out with their family and friends. At night, the lake lights up real good.

Of course, there’s the food

A while ago, there was a story about Barack Obama and Anthony Bourdain eating dinner in Hanoi. Since that happened, the restaurant they went to, Bún chả Hương Liên, became famous and tons of people went there to eat the “Obama Special” – Bún chả and spring rolls. A local guide we met later in the trip told us that this restaurant is overrated, but I thought it was good. Thanks Obama!

There was also this barbecue place. There’s a giant selection of meats with different cuts and you pick which ones you want and it all gets cooked on a giant barbecue platter. Aside from the usual beef, chicken, pork, they had an entire frog. Looking back, I should have ordered it. Frog is definitely up there on my list of delicious exotic meats. If I knew Vietnamese, I would have asked them if they had dog meat because I would have ordered that for sure. We ended up picking up a few things that looked good, but had no idea what they were. One of them tasted like beef and was kind of chewy and reminded me of beef intestines that I ate in Osaka.

At one point in the trip, we got a volunteer tour guide to take us around the city to eat stuff. We help them practice their English and pay for their food, and they show us around – it’s a pretty cool idea. Our guide took us to try some fried eel in a salad and some eel soup.

Our guide also took us to eat this Vietnamese version of a steamed rice roll. Not as good as the kind I eat at Dim Sum.

Everybody knows Pho. It’s a lot different than the ones I eat in Vancouver and not very comparable. The ones I ate in Hanoi were generally plainer and was less savoury. It also costs about $2.50 USD. Some people prefer this taste over the kind we get in the western world, but I would disagree.

By far the best meal of the whole trip was at “The Hung Snake Restaurant“. Yep, I got to eat an entire snake – a bamboo snake. A guy came with a sack with a snake inside. He took it out and let me hold onto it to “play” with it before eating. Sure, okay, playing with a snake is great and all, but that thing was frickin poisonous and the entire time, I was just kind of freaked out and hoped that thing didn’t bite me.

The next thing you know, the guy takes out a platter with scissors and knives like in a surgery and cuts open the snake. As it bleeds to death, he drains its blood into a glass, THEN takes out its beating heart and puts it into another glass. FINALLY, he cuts out part of the stomach and drains its stomach bile into another glass. He hands me the glass with the still beating heart and tells me to eat it. It was exactly what I came here for and it was amazing. I only wish I had chewed the heart before swallowing it instead of swallowing it whole like he told me to.

The blood and bile were mixed with some sort of alcohol and I drank those too. My friend on the other hand, could not bear to watch the snake get murdered like that and barely ate any of it when the food actually came. More for me :). All sorts of snake bits were used with different cooking styles: grilled meat, deep fried bones, deep fried skin, snake tail boiled into a soup, sauteed meat, spring rolls, steamed meat, the stomach, etc. Everything was GREAT. A++, would eat again – the king cobra next time.

In addition to snake, I also wanted to try cat meat. I asked the staff at our hostel and he told me that he knew that people did eat that sort of stuff, but wasn’t able to tell me where. Too bad. I also missed out on this silkworm omelette that they only serve in the mornings. Everywhere I saw a cat or a dog, I’d wonder if people would kidnap them and cook them =/

As usual, I drank the local beer. The Beer Corner is a popular place. It was weird to see a kid who looked about 12 pour my beer. Apparently that’s allowed around here.

Their way of life can be very simple

Just some kids playing Tug of War.

Let’s cut some hair on the side of the street.

Unique history and culture

This is a country where for so much of their history, they were conquered by someone: China, France, Japan, etc. The French left behind some of their architecture too.

Since Vietnam is a communist country, of course there has to be a statue of Lenin.

There was also an influence from Confucianism here. Enough for there to be a Confucian temple, which is also the site of the Imperial Academy, the first national university of Vietnam.

How fitting that when we were there, there were groups of students posing for pictures for graduation.

They’re really proud about going up against their enemies and winning

From going to museums there, they are really happy about finally having their own country back again. There were so many exhibits about their triumphs against the colonialists, against the Japanese, and eventually against the Americans. They even claim that the Americans fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin Incident as an excuse to fight in Vietnam. That could very well have been true, but everything just seemed super biased. During the war, the North Vietnamese shot down a B-52, which they proudly display.

There’s even a bit of a B-52 in the water where it crashed. The buidings in the back are also super narrow, which was because buildings were taxed on their width (not sure if this is still the case though).

They also like to point out all the terrible things that their French conquerors did to them at the Prison Museum.

The body of Ho Chi Minh is preserved and displayed in the mausoleum. When we were there though, his body had been transported to Russia for some work, and so it wasn’t on display.

At their military museum, they went on about how they fought a war against American imperialism and showed off the weapons they used. And of course, every time I see a tank, I think “cuz baby you’re a firreeeworkkkkk” and drinking margaritas.

I think that sums up the visit to Hanoi real good!

Link to photo album: here

Ever since I got to Stuttgart I looked for a few Asian things that I always took for granted back in Vancouver. Today, I fulfilled two of these things, which was finding an Asian hairstylist to cut my hair (since I doubted that the local hairstylists in Gerlingen could do Asian haircuts) and finding authentic Chinese food.

I figured after growing my hair for 3 and a half months, the time to get a haircut came. Some time ago, someone recommended a Chinese hairstylist for me. Now I don’t speak German and I doubted that the hairstylist knew English. This meant I would probably need to speak Mandarin, although I hoped that she knew Cantonese. I grew up learning Cantonese in Canada, which means that my I lack proficiency in the language (similar to learning a language that one doesn’t receive a lot of chances to practice). If I lacked proficiency in Cantonese, surely my knowledge in Mandarin suffered even more. The only practice in Mandarin I ever got was practicing it in four classes for it almost four years ago. Everybody knows practicing a language in class is drastically different than using it in a real life setting.

On Thursday, I gave the hairstylist a call to book my appointment, and as I expected, she spoke Mandarin. Luckily I prepared myself for this. I looked up certain words that I knew I’d need to know like ‘haircut’. I drew upon what I learned almost four years ago and said that I wanted to book an appointment for a haircut. She said something back and I had no clue what she said. The only thing I could say back was, ‘sorry, my Mandarin isn’t so good’. Then she figured I knew German and started speaking that, in which case I replied ‘my German is worse’. She knew neither English nor Cantonese either.

Luckily, she started speaking slower and so I managed understand her words a lot better. I didn’t understand every single word in the sentence, but I understood enough to say something back. Less than a minute later, I successfully booked the appointment. After hanging up the phone, I realized that my heart rate rose to point that it felt like I ran a marathon. I guess I felt real nervous for my first real conversation in Mandarin.

On Saturday, I showed up at where I needed to be to get my haircut. I didn’t feel nervous speaking in Mandarin this time. In fact, I barely had to think about what I wanted to say. When people don’t have a lot of experience in a particular language, they end up thinking about how to say something. Although some questions did stump me though. I didn’t really know how to describe the haircut I wanted. I couldn’t even do that in English. So in the end, I just said to keep the hair the same style, but shorter. That’s what I wanted, and I didn’t have to describe the style.

While she cut my hair, we made random conversation and the topic of professions came up and I tried to tell her what people in my family did for a living, but I had no idea how to say that. Luckily, Google Translate helped me out with that.

I found it super ironic that my Mandarin would get better in a place like Germany, but I guess that is the difference between the Chinese community in Vancouver and Stuttgart. Most Chinese people in Stuttgart come from Mainland China, while in Vancouver, there are people from every part of China. As I left after getting my haircut, thoughts in Mandarin kept buzzing through my mind for a little while. I guess all those classes in Mandarin really paid off!

After the haircut, I went to meet up with my friend for some authentic Chinese Dim Sum. Yet again, another situation requiring me to speak Mandarin revealed itself. However, this time, the lady at the restaurant could understand Cantonese although she didn’t know how to speak it. She spoke so fast, that at the end of her sentence, I stared at her with a blank face and I had no idea what just happened. After that, she spoke a little slower and then everything became clear.

Maybe I’m overgeneralizing, but despite the fact that this definitely was an authentic Chinese Dim Sum restaurant, I felt that the quality of Dim Sum in Vancouver greatly surpassed that of this restaurant, if not Germany as a whole. It wasn’t bad, but Dim Sum in Vancouver is just better.

After lunch, we went to the Japanese Festival organized by the German-Japanese Society in Stuttgart. Here, I saw the Japanese people prepare rice cakes (Mochi). They put a large clump of rice into a wooden barrel and beat it with giant wooden mallets until the rice turned into the paste that they use for the rice cakes. They let visitors hammer the rice too, and afterward we all got to enjoy it.

Later in the evening, I went to another friend’s flat for his welcome party that was two months overdue. There I met up with the rest of my friends as well and everybody got their drink on, except for me because I only drink in moderation. The others there had a really unique way of drinking Vodka shots. They’d use these packages of powder intended for mixing with water to make juice, and they poured it in their mouth and took the Vodka shot. With the Vodka and the powder mixed together, they slosh it around before swallowing it. I tried one with the orange flavored powder, and it tasted so good, but I knew not to drink too much otherwise I’d end up puking on the floor or something.

They also introduced us to one of their drinking games. It involved pouring water into a cup floating in a bigger container of water. Each person took their turn to pour any amount of water into the cup, so long as the cup didn’t sink. The player that causes the cup to sink, must take the shot.

As the night went on, everyone got more and more intoxicated, except for me though. I just felt like going home. Unfortunately, I missed the last train back so I had to take the night bus. It took me about two hours to get home, when it would have taken me 40 minutes by train.

After learning from a colleague that a factory outlet existed in Metzingen, I organized a trip there with a few of my friends from Bosch. I was told that this place would have lots of brand name items at really reduced prices. I guess that is similar to the factory outlets in the United States. But even at the reduced prices, the items are still quite pricey. I suppose that this is good for people who really want their brand name clothes. Unfortunately, I only bought a t-shirt since I couldn’t find anything else I liked here. But a friend of mine did manage to buy a pair of shoes for 35 euro when its original price was 180 euro.

Not satisfied with my shopping experience in Metzingen, I decided to continue shopping in Stuttgart. The people that I were with were pretty much done shopping for the day, so I went on my own. Going places alone just gives me so much freedom. It feels quite nice. Being tired already from walking so much in Metzingen, I finished shopping in Stuttgart an hour and a half later. On my way home, I found something that I had been searching for for the past little while.

I found a place that serves Chinese Dim Sum and Hot Pot. This is like a taste of home. Looks like I’m going to have to go here soon, even if it is quite expensive for a restaurant (14 euro). Judging from the restaurant’s banner, it doesn’t look like westernized Chinese food either! Fantastic surprise for me.