Tag Archives: street food

Hong Kong- and an Explosion of Experiences

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We left Australia, flying out of Melbourne and knowing that this elongated excursion had little more time to run.

But there was one more set of thrills to be had before we turned our noses towards home. Australia, as we all know, is a long way from the UK and anyone with a brain cell realises that the civilized way to do it is to have a stopover. And if you aren’t time-poor, it’s even better to stretch the stopover into a few days.

This means, of course that you need to choose somewhere you want to see, somewhere worth the time. We’d opted for Hong Kong, the nearest thing to China but with a westernised twist. These days I’d be uneasy about visiting this commercial outpost of China, fearful of unrest or draconian laws since it was hauled, kicking and screaming under Chinese government rule. But this was before the protests and the unrest and all was calm.

Our hotel was in Kowloon, which is across Victoria Harbour from Hong Kong Island. Our immediate area was teeming with commerce, especially street food stalls selling a plethora of foods- some recognisable but many not. Plucked fowl were hung by their feet from the tops of stalls as were other, unidentifiable body parts. We needed to eat, of course and were keen to sample street food, but didn’t know where to start. Eventually we found a stall selling pork balls and settled for those; unadventurous but safe!

In order to see Hong Kong Island we had to get across Victoria Harbour. There are ferries but we opted to go via the metro, which runs underneath. Navigating and understanding the vagaries of ticketing and where to go was not easy- it never is in a foreign city- but we managed it. On the crowded train I was struck by the fashion sense of the beautiful young women passengers, most of whom were dressed wonderfully and with immensely vertiginous footwear.

On the Hong Kong Island side there were more bustling alleys full of food stalls and I wondered how it was possible to sell such an abundance of meals and snacks. But then, the entire place is packed solid with people, notoriously so, as is evident in the forest of skyscrapers soaring up to dizzying heights. New blocks were being constructed everywhere despite the fact that there didn’t seem to be any more room for them. The scaffolding for these constructions was all of bamboo poles, which was an eye-opener!

The trams that ran along the main streets had a character of their own. Unlike the long, sleek, snaking trams of European cities they were individual vehicles, quaintly old-fashioned and colourful, begging to be ridden!

Next week; Night markets, the misty peak, the restaurant conundrum and a foray to the mainland via unusual transport.

Grace is also known as the novelist, Jane Deans. Her new novel, The Conways at Earthsend is now out and available from Amazon, Waterstones, Goodreads, W H Smith, Pegasus Publishing and many more sites. Visit my website: janedeans.com or my author page on Facebook: (1) Jane Deans, Novellist, Short Fiction and Blog | Facebook

Long Live Story Telling

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                Here endeth Fiction Month on Anecdotage. If you’ve read and enjoyed the stories, check out ‘The Year of Familiar Strangers’[by my alter ego, Jane Deans]-available to download from Amazon[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Year-Familiar-Strangers-Jane-Deans-ebook/dp/B00EWNXIFA]. 

; or send an email address on a blog comment to enter the draw for a free download before the end of December.

                Thanks to everyone for your visits, ‘likes’ and comments. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by the response. It has given me food for thought. Stories are never going to go out of fashion and can be enjoyed by all, from the very young to the very old.

                Now for the confession. Besides the [very real] conditions of Alice Munro’s success and National Novel Writing Month I did have an ulterior motive for preparing all those stories for November. I was away. In an indulgent, luxurious, hedonistic moment last April I booked a month long trip to Thailand, which is where we have been while ‘Fiction Month’  was enjoying its own heady moment in the sun.

                During the last couple of years I’d become increasingly aware that a large number of friends, acquaintances and family members had been to Thailand, indeed many take repeated trips there. This intrigued me. Why was it such a popular destination? As usual, ‘word-of-mouth’, photos, books and the internet are not enough. I have to see for myself. November, a drab, colourless, draughty month in the UK, seemed a good choice of time, the three destinations we’d chosen would give a fair snapshot of this gem of the East. We would avoid a good deal of the welling Christmas frenzy and the long, dark nights.

                To arrive to Bangkok from the UK in November is to step out from a chiller cabinet into an oven and feels as if a hair dryer is being trained on your face. The first hurdle is to negotiate the winding pen that houses the immigration queue, the second the queue for a taxi, the third the hour long drive into Bangkok centre, where the traffic seems at a constant standstill in the shadow of the concrete, elevation of the sky-train. Despite all of this it is a teeming, colourful, chaotic wonder of a city with beautiful, exotic temples, tall sky towers, crowded night markets, waterways with packed water taxis, a wide, winding river, gaudy tuk-tuks, street stalls selling a fantastic variety of bizarre identifiable and non-identifiable foods-[fried locusts being a popular option], ‘Irish’ pubs, ‘Australian’ pubs, bars with tiny, barely clad girls, bars with less tiny, glamorous, deep voiced ladyboys and a vast range of restaurants selling some of the most delicious meals you could hope to enjoy.

                An evening’s entertainment in this whirlwind of a metropolis need consist only of sitting in a bar and watching the street activity, a ceaseless, moving drama playing out each and every night until late and followed in the morning by an almost eyrie calm, the streets having been miraculously cleaned and tidied.

                We stayed five nights, by which time Husband had developed a persistent cough as a result of the poor air quality. We moved on to destination two…