Category Archives: Things I Love Thursday

It’s my last week in Hong Kong and I’m thinking of all the things I’m happy and thankful for and will miss:

♥ Being back home and being able to see family and some very old friends. Relationships are liable to change over distance and time, so I’m particularly appreciative of the ones still around.

♥ Such cheap, good food! Latest escapade today: 24 inch wide pizza. It was also genuinely delicious.

♥ The Octopus pay pass. It’s so easy and convenient to use, not only on the train system and all busses, but also at car parks, several convenience stores and vending machines.

♥ Listening to train and bus stops being announced in Cantonese, Mandarin and English.

♥ Inexpensive clothing at Fa Yuen Street in Mong Kok, where everything is either about or below CA$10.

♥ Mochi ice cream: balls of ice cream wrapped in mochi skins. One of my most beloved snacks as a child and the perfect summer treat. (They came out with a honeydew flavour!)

♥ A glass lamp that my mother bought for me some ten years ago is still my favourite; the glass is pink and has painted flowers on the inside so it glows beautifully when lit in the dark. If I ever have my own permanent home, I’d like to bring this over, if I could be sure it wouldn’t break.

♥ Visiting a really old puppy today who is fifteen years old but thinks he’s five or younger. He kept wanting to play despite wheezing like my grandmother. He looks a little like the puppy in the icon, but darker and much happier.

Vancouver in a few days! Summer blue skies, homemade salsa and guacamole. I’m looking forward to those.

I’m rushing about today because I have errands to run and a Chinese wedding banquet to go to tonight that probably won’t end until late. This is a quick list of what’s been fabulous in the last two weeks (I missed last week because my mind was on other things while in China):

♥ Seeing my grandmother in Beijing who is doing quite well. She was very pleased to see both my brother and myself at the same time, which hasn’t happened since four years ago.

♥ Beijing food I love: pancakes, chive turnovers, Peking roast duck, homemade dumplings (from scratch!)… and also the fabulous Beijing Books Building where I think I could sit and read all day on any of its several floors (and many people do). I stocked up on some learning materials and also a book on learning to speak Shanghainese. If I could learn live, that would be awesome, but sadly, I have no Shanghainese-speaking relatives in Vancouver.

♥ While on the subject of food, Hong Kong’s Pizza Express dough balls have got to be one of their best inventions. Just balls of doughs baked like a pizza crust and served with butter, pesto rosso and pesto genovese. Definitely have to try this when I get back to Vancouver.

♥ Other food I am gleefully consuming include Hong Kong dim sum (Vancouver dim sum is quite decent but it’s wonderful to have so many more choices for cheap), soup with puff pastries (I have a thing about puff pastries), egg tarts (my love for egg tarts seems to be passing into legend as three different people purchased me egg tarts over the last four days without me saying a word), salted fish and diced chicken fried rice, Chinese desserts… I think I’m going to go on an expedition for tofu fa tomorrow, I’ve been craving it so much.

♥ I went to Macau yesterday for a day trip and we ate plenty of good food and watched my brother bungee jump from Macau Tower. More on that later!

♥ My fabulous brother also set up wi-fi at home in Hong Kong so I can now access the internet as much as I want. Even though I don’t do it very often, it’s nice to have that option.

♥ Axis of Awesome’s ‘How to Write a Love Song’ amuses me:

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♥ Dear Tommy, I’m so glad I got to see you before you moved on. You were the cat that taught me how to love every other cat and I’ll always think the world of you.

To continue my Hong Kong edition of Things I Love Thursday!

♥ Soft, sweet, fleshy mangoes I have to be careful not to drip juice all over the place. I just can’t find fruit like this in Vancouver — that, or I’ve been shopping in all the wrong places.

♥ That said, I miss being able to drink water from the tap, filtered through my Brita jug. HK boiled water just tastes bad. (Word of warning to the uninitiated: it is not a good idea to drink water from the tap here; the pipes are not designed with drinking water in mind. While some individuals get away unscathed, there are plenty of unwitting visitors or new immigrants who end up in hospital as a result of drinking straight from the tap.)

♥ We get a splendid view of the cityscape at night. There are so many lights, it never gets truly dark (or at least, you have to work hard to find a place like that). Although the Tourism Board likes to market Hong Kong as the ‘City of Life’, I think of it more often as the ‘City of Lights’. Sometimes I catch glimpses of the nightly laser show that goes on around the harbour; I mean to go down there and actually watch it one of these days.

♥ I love the torrential rain: when rain decides to come down, it comes down. None of this wishy-washy, half-hearted Vancouver drizzle nonsense! And after a couple of hours of downpour, it’s over.

♥ Then again, I also adore the sunshine. It’s been grey for most of the past week but the sun came out yesterday and is predicted to last today, as well. With another week of rain forecasted — and the Hong Kong weather observatory tends to be fairly accurate, which is a lot more than I can say for the Vancouver forecasters — I’m off and about as soon as I’m done with this post!

♥ One of my Vancouver friends is in town, and I’ll be joining him and a high school friend of mine at the Peak today. There are some lovely views up there on even a semi-clear day and I shall post pictures, if I get any decent ones.

♥ Also, let me just reiterate how much I love Sara Bareilles; her sassiness in ‘King of Anything’ cheers me right up when I’m fretting (which is a lot, lately).

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