Chinese New Year

I’m back from China! I didn’t get a chance yet to talk about spending the first few days of Spring Festival in Hong Kong, so here it is in pictures and video.

Eating at a dai pai dong outdoor restaurant in Shatin:

I tried some of the popular Cantonese “Pissing Shrimp.” Not impressed.

Insanely packed Flower Market in Causeway Bay where they sell all sorts of useless blow-up toys, gag gifts, and stuffed animals. And some flowers.

An example of a totally cute and useless bean bag you can buy at the market. It’s a rice in a bag. And the bag says rice on it in Chinese. And you can take it out of the bag. The silliness.

And then there’s street food.

Just your everyday waffle, except with butter and peanut butter and white sugar and condensed milk. I totally ate this.

On New Years, the subways run all night. We still took a taxi from Shatin because we were in no mood to walk up that mountain.

I was stoked about the New Year’s Parade at Tsim Sha Tsui, but there was some problem and nothing happened for a good hour. We waited until the first float finally came and then we left. An anticlimactic finish but here’s the eager crowd:

Taiwan Part 2

My next two days in Taiwan weren’t much more than a rapid series of eating and sleeping. Saturday morning I took a train to Changhua, the suburb where my dad grew up near Taichung. I walked into my grandparents’ house to surprise them and my grandma’s like “Who the hell are you?” Must be the hair…

So that was fun, and then we all had lunch and ate enormous quantities of local fruit.

In the afternoon we went to Bagua Mountain near my grandparents’ house, a scenic area with it’s own impressive giant Buddha statue. Not quite as big as it’s Lantau Island buddy but almost 30 years older.

We head back, I eat about 30 more pieces of fruit and fall back asleep. Am awakened for dinner. Sleep on the train back to Taipei. Arrive back in Taipei and sleep. The constant barrage of food is overloading my system.

Sunday I am awakened by my mom to have breakfast with my grandparents at Mos Burger, of all places. It’s a fast food chain in Hong Kong and Taiwan and a few other places. I eat a hilariously shrimpy burger and nap.

I wake up to meet my aunt and cousin at a nice hotel for a BUFFET lunch. It is amazing and I have Haagen-Daz ice cream and creme brulee for dessert among other things. I’m sorry I forgot to take pictures! I nap on the subway on the way to Ximen.

Ximen is like Sai-Yeung Street in Mongkok, except bigger and is a hangout place for mostly young people.

I visit Mr. Donut and try their peculiar chewy-donut.

I immediately go home for dinner and nap. I wake up to go to the night market with my mom. Taiwan night markets are a ton of fun and have special food and shopping sections, as well as several pet shops. Cute!

Take a good look at this picture. That’s peanut-flavored shaved ice. Doesn’t it look like tanbark or something totally not made of ice? If you’re not familiar with shaved ice, it’s made by taking big blocks of ice and grinding them down by hand or machine.

Monday came around and it was time to go home, but I’ll be back in the summer for more never-hungry times in Taiwan. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to write about Lunar New Year’s, but I’ll update you on it as soon as I get back from CHINA!

Taiwan Part 1

My mom came to Taipei so I flew back last weekend for the first time in about five years. There wasn’t much I remembered about Taiwan except the visiting relatives part, so much of it seemed pretty new to me.

I stayed at my grandparents’ apartment near the central area of Taipei, where I slept well for the first time in many days. Friday I went to have lunch with my mom, and so began my gastronomical weekend extravaganza.

We went to Din Tai Fung, one of the “must-eat” places in Taipei, and very popular among tourists.

Din Tai Fung’s famous Xiao Long Bao, or Little Dragon Buns, are nothing short of spectacular. I can honestly say I’ve never been happier having juicy balls burst into my mouth.

Before heading to the subway I had to grab some of these streetside red-bean cakey things.

Got my YO-YO card and hopped on the MRT, which is almost identical to Hong Kong’s. While waiting on the street for a shuttle to Taipei 101, these girls (and guy) were doing a promotion for some video game. Here they are in their fun outfits:

And that’s Taipei 101, the tallest building in the world with the fastest elevator in the world, which takes you to the 89th floor in 37 seconds.

The city of Taipei:

In the lower levels of Taipei 101 are clothing and food stores, so I decided it was time for another treat.

Peanut butter gelato + bananas + chocolate syrup and sprinkles + whipped cream + crepe batter = unconsciousness

After awakening and having dinner with the relatives we wandered the town in its late hours. Taipei at night has a more comfortable, homely feeling than the fast streets of Hong Kong. The street food is also a little less scary-looking. I finished the night with some of these sugary rolls.

The food-fest continues…

Fobification

I got my hair cut and dyed last week at a Mongkok salon called “2048 Hairdressing: Sense Cut Group.” Wow.

If the name didn’t tip you off, the place had a bit of an exclusive lounge-type vibe to it, what with it’s dimly lit, second-floor setting and all the hot 20-somethings sporting trendy black outfits all over black leather couches. So I flip open one of those magazines and am amazed by all the Asian hairstyles! You ordinarily would never find more than one Asian male hairstyle in one of those magazines back home, and it’s usually something impossibly crazy and French. Anyways I picked my cut and color, here are the end results:

Before:

After:

Nothing too dramatic, but it was about time. 6 months of shagginess is no good for anybody. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Jiu to the Jitsu

After about two weeks of eating, going out, and definitely not exercising, I was starting to get pretty restless. So I scoped out the nearest Brazilian jiu-jitsu academy, Kowloon BJJ, and was very impressed – ample mat space, good instruction, lots of training partners. There’s a fun, distinctly Chinese sense of camaraderie among the guys and gals, even though many of them are from Australia, Japan, and the UK. It’s also only a 30-minute train ride from school, so I’m pretty much set for the semester.

Now for the even bigger news. Through the academy I found out that Marcelo Garcia was going to be holding a two-day seminar right here in Hong Kong, first weekend of February! Yes, THE Marcelo Garcia! Is that crazy or what?!

…Okay, so you probably don’t know who Marcelo Garcia is. Well he’s only the baddest pound-for-pound grappler on the planet and my personal jiu-jitsu hero, so needless to say, I was totally there.

That was last weekend. It was Marcelo’s first time in Hong Kong, and BJJ practitioners came from as far as Singapore and Thailand to learn from the master. He’s only 24 years old, and already 5 times world champion and twice ADCC champion, but you’d never guess it from his modest demeanor. He would smile, shake someone’s hand and say, “Hello, I’m Marcelo.” The people’s champion, I’m telling you.

The seminar was good stuff, with both a gi and no-gi day, and mostly everyone got to train with Marcelo afterwards. Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of him beating me up but I do have a video, so if you want I’ll send it to you.

Marcelo Garcia mops up some big guys:

Good fun. Hope all’s well back home, more to come later!