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Hong Kong and Macau
Apr. 27th, 2010 04:57 pm(Holy verbosity, Batman, this entry is LONG. If you want to skip the words and just look at my pictures, you can hop over here.)
I have to make a confession before moving on with this narrative, this story about my travels all over Asia: I'm not really brave enough to go traveling alone all over Asia. Try to send me on a solo trip through, say, Vietnam, and I would probably discover some urgent other thing I had to do. What I really did was a tour of the former British Empire in Asia. This meant that I got used to looking right before crossing the street, but mostly it meant that there was widespread English everywhere I went traveling.
I spent a moment feeling slightly guilty about this imperial manner of travel and how it stuck, if not within my comfort zone, then as close to it as I could reasonably get on this side of the world. But I got over it as soon as I arrived in the Hong Kong airport on Friday morning, after a sleepless overnight trip from India, and found a place to buy a blueberry muffin and a pot of Earl Grey.
The western food in Hong Kong was more or less the best thing that had ever happened to me. I've been eating Chinese food pretty happily since October--there is weird food, but it's hard to get tired of rice and noodles; the dumplings are always decent, vegetables are plentiful, and I've gotten rather fond of some of the more distinctly Chinese flavors even though I don't know what to call them. (Just today I had some tofu in a sauce that tasted kind of...caramelized? Weird, but good.) And the food in India was marvelous, except on the couple of occasions when it was too spicy for me. But I didn't realize how much I missed pastries and the coffeeshops where you can just sit and have a slow cup of tea and read your book or check your e-mail and everyone else is doing the same thing. As I recount this part of the trip, you can assume every day starts with "First I went to Starbucks/Delifrance and had a muffin/scone/croissant and it was amazing."
( So, I went to the Delifrance in the airport and had a muffin and it was amazing... )
I have to make a confession before moving on with this narrative, this story about my travels all over Asia: I'm not really brave enough to go traveling alone all over Asia. Try to send me on a solo trip through, say, Vietnam, and I would probably discover some urgent other thing I had to do. What I really did was a tour of the former British Empire in Asia. This meant that I got used to looking right before crossing the street, but mostly it meant that there was widespread English everywhere I went traveling.
I spent a moment feeling slightly guilty about this imperial manner of travel and how it stuck, if not within my comfort zone, then as close to it as I could reasonably get on this side of the world. But I got over it as soon as I arrived in the Hong Kong airport on Friday morning, after a sleepless overnight trip from India, and found a place to buy a blueberry muffin and a pot of Earl Grey.
The western food in Hong Kong was more or less the best thing that had ever happened to me. I've been eating Chinese food pretty happily since October--there is weird food, but it's hard to get tired of rice and noodles; the dumplings are always decent, vegetables are plentiful, and I've gotten rather fond of some of the more distinctly Chinese flavors even though I don't know what to call them. (Just today I had some tofu in a sauce that tasted kind of...caramelized? Weird, but good.) And the food in India was marvelous, except on the couple of occasions when it was too spicy for me. But I didn't realize how much I missed pastries and the coffeeshops where you can just sit and have a slow cup of tea and read your book or check your e-mail and everyone else is doing the same thing. As I recount this part of the trip, you can assume every day starts with "First I went to Starbucks/Delifrance and had a muffin/scone/croissant and it was amazing."
( So, I went to the Delifrance in the airport and had a muffin and it was amazing... )
