More Street Food

I'm doing well on the resolution to eat more street food. It helps to wander slowly around sightseeing in a group of six - someone is always hungry.

Of the things I've eaten recently, the waffles smelled the best, the fish balls were the cheapest and worst and the octopus had the most interesting texture.

• Roasted sweet potato in TST ($18)
• Egg waffle (plain) also in TST ($10)
  
• Curried fish balls (tough and repulsive) at the Big Buddha ($6)
• Boiled octopus (tender and jellied) at the Big Buddha as well (10)
  
• Sausage ($17)
• Roasted corn ($18)

Ok, so they're not the Sequoias, but...

When I was eleven or twelve we drove through Sequoia National Park. There was a tree that the road used to go through and apparently very big other trees. But I don't quite remember much other than the extreme irritation I felt when I was forced to look up from my book, or even worse, leave the car.

It was this awesome book about a boy who had a real jerk of a father who, in preparation to sending him to boarding school, sent him to a military wilderness boot camp in the summer to toughen him up. The boy learned a bunch of survival skills and then took off into the wilderness on his own. I loved it. I still remember him calling his dad at one point and telling him he'd come home on certain conditions - otherwise he'd just stay out in the woods. What a great book that was!

So yesterday when we looked at a bunch of modern art that's on temporary installation in Central - a couple of Botero's, Modigliani, Indiana, and a some others, could I really complain about my boy reading the third Dune book all day?

Here's the other one sketching a Dali that's in the lobby of the Mandarin.

Ferry food

Lor Mai Gai is filled with chicken, a preserved duck egg, gravy, some sweet sausage something all wrapped in sticky rice and then wrapped round with a green leaf and steamed. It's yummy, bony, odd and cheap - everything street food should be.

Another of our favourites is the barbecued pork buns. They are $5 each and were great in Korea, too.

There are all kinds of dumplings and fried things and dim sum to buy on the street. I've got to admit that I haven't tried half the options. For one thing, it's daunting pushing through a crowd to try and order something that you're not sure what it is, so you can't just shout out what you want. For another, not all of it smells that great.

But it's spring break tomorrow, starting at noon. I'm going to set a goal to have a different street food every day. Curried fish balls, here I come.

Phlower Phair Photos

A few years ago, I was entrusted with the filing box of my great grandmother's photo albums. There's a box of loose photos that have lots of my grandpa as a little kid. I can pick him out in an instant even in group shots and he looks like a kid you wouldn't want to have in class.
But most of the photo albums don't have pictures of people in them. There are page after yellowed, sticky page of photos of deer, cars and Disneyland, but the biggest collection of pictures is dedicated to Polaroids of orchid shows.
Here's me telling an enthusiastic Granite about that at the Hong Kong Flower Show:It was packed and steamy in the March sunshine, people and cameras. Thousands of people crowded around each stand of flowers, taking pictures of topiaries, flower arrangements, pots of orchids, garden designs and flower beds. Some were using cell-phones and some were using professional-grade, huge-lensed cameras with tripods. My favorites were the the people taking the pictures of pansies as if they were the most exotic thing in the world.I tortured the kids for several hours looking at orchids. I bought a pitcher plant, a hanging orchid and some air plants. It would have been harder to stop shopping if it weren't for the fact that I had basically no money. Lots of the orchids were $20 HK each, which is less than $3 US! The most frustrating thing is that the four orchids I already have at home keep putting out new buds while I keep waiting for them to die back so I can buy some more.

Blizzard approaching

You know the feeling of anticipation in the air when there's a forecasted blizzard and all the school is a-buzzing with wondering about a snow day? Well, last Thursday was like that, except it was the flu a-comin'.
The first I knew of it was Wednesday night when from the deepest sleep of twenty minutes in, I heard a ringing that turned out to be my cell phone. Gregory got it and I listened to him tell a parent: No he wouldn't wake me up. No, we hadn't heard anything about a school closure. No, I didn't decide if school would be open. He found out then that at around 10:30 at night the government had issued an announcement that primary schools and kindergartens would close early for Easter break because of the flu outbreak.
The flu outbreak: four children had died in the past week. There were 511 cases total of the flu in the Hong Kong schools. (This is out of a population of 7 million people.) This is not the bird flu.
So we went to school. Most classes had only around half of the kids there. Kids dribbled in throughout the day as the parents discovered our school was open. Rumors spread wildly about which international schools were open and who and when the decision would be made if we should close or not.
The long-term staff told us about being in Hong Kong during SARS. The schools were closed for three weeks then and the teachers had to e-mail work to the students, get it back, mark it and come to school every day. Lots of the ex-pat kids and parents flew out of the country for safety; no one was in the streets; Hong Kong felt like a sad ghost town.
But that was then and only 6 kids at our school, out of a school of 1600, were home sick with anything on the Wednesday before. Nevertheless, mid-afternoon the clarification came down from the government that all schools have to close. After being a-quiver all day over the possibility, once the announcement was made, I was exhausted!
So here I am at school with no students for the week before Easter break. And the government just announced today that two of the four kids who died didn't have the flu. An odd sort of gift from the gods.