Normally during Golden Week in Japan we spend the time at home taking it easy, cooking various foods and sitting outside enjoying the pre-summer cooler weather. Last year we were lucky to have Brian Haven visit – it was good to have the free time available to hang out.
But this year, out of curiosity I did a little research and found some cheaper tickets to Hong Kong. We’ve been before but we also wanted to combo a trip to Macau, so we decided to pull the trigger and go for a few days.
Going in we had a couple of goals – check out Macau and see how much of the Portuguese influence remained, to eat lots of dim sum in Hong Kong, and to spend some leisure time as we’d done lots of sightseeing in HK already.
The trip started like many others – a bus ride from Sannomiya to Kansai Airport. This time we were going to terminal 2, where the Peach airline was based. There was a surprising amount of people waiting for the bus – mostly foreigners going home – and we were a little worried if we had allotted enough time. However the bus arrived on schedule, and we checked into our flight and had to kill a little time at the terminal air side. We had some yakisoba and katsu curry while we waited, and stocked up on beer and snacks to take onto the four hour flight.
Unfortunately our flight was delayed an hour or so due to congestion at Hong Kong airport – but I guess anytime you fly with a low-cost carrier (like Peach) you run this risk. It resulted in us drinking at the gate while we waited even longer.
Eventually we got underway, and the tight seating onboard had me mostly awake for the flight.
Hong Kong airport wasn’t too congested when we arrived, and the line for immigration was only 15 minutes or so. We were traveling light with just a backpack so no need to wait around for a suitcase. We caught the high speed train from the airport to the city pretty easily after buying an Octopus card for Kuniko to use. I was using an Octopus app on my phone that was pretty convenient.
On our way to the hotel on our train we realized that it might be more direct to get off at Kowloon instead of the end of the line in Hong Kong, so we jumped off (just in time, too) and navigated the hot humid streets towards our hotel. On the way we walked through construction zones (accidentally on the construction side) but eventually found our way to the area of our hotel on Nathan Road in the Jordan area.
The lobby of the Madera Hotel smelled strongly of some kind of perfume, but our room on the 22nd floor was really nice – a great size for us and a nice view of the city to the north of us.
We dropped off our stuff and then hustled outside to go look for some dinner. We ended up at Dim Sum Here, a chain dim sum place that was supposed to be cheap and pretty good quality for the price. Most importantly, they served dim sum all day rather than just in the morning like the nicer restaurants.
We picked out an assortment, sharing a table with a strange pair of ladies who struck up a conversation asking about what province of America I am from, and then giving me a leaflet for their Christian church. The dim sum here was good although it benefited from being the first dim sum of the trip and we were pretty hungry.
We walked around the neighborhood afterwards, also stopping for some won ton noodles at a bright noodle shop with slippery floors. There streets were filled with appetizing restaurants and it seemed like we were going to have plenty of options during our stay. Nearby was also a night market that seemed well attended and a few streets that looked a little dodgy. But those just added to the charm of the area, and we were happy with the hotel location.
The next day was a full day in Hong Kong, and I wanted to really get the full dim sum experience. We got up early and walked north through some light rain to a classic morning dim sum place, the London Restaurant. Along the way we walked past so many interesting restaurants, a couple of which were open early. So many food options!
We’d gone to the London Restaurant before – it has a huge dining room with old ladies pushing carts around. You had to go to the carts, and they removed the lids to show you what they had. Nobody spoke English, so mainly it is done with gestures. We had some classics here – shrimp shumai, shorompo, and a new one for us: “chu chow fun gor”, which was a vegetable dumpling with water chestnuts, peanuts, and garlic. To pay we escorted our server to a stern lady in a both who accepted payment – it felt like a mafia-style interaction. This is as authentic a dim sum experience as I think you can get in Hong Kong.
We spent most of the day walking around, and eating as we went. The rain came and went, and so we often ducked into a place for some food to escape bad weather. Once again we came across the phenomenon of all the immigrant maids enjoying picnics on the street on their day off. Some of the other places we visited were a Shandong dumpling place, a Sichuan restaurant, a Michelin star noodle place, and a Chinese cafe/dessert place.
One of the things I wanted to do on this trip was try Chinese food from some other areas, and so that was why we visited the Shandong restaurant. No English menus here, so we depended on our phone translator. It had food from northern China, and many kinds of dumplings (mainly soup style) that contained different meats and crunchy celery to vary the mouthfeel a little. We really enjoyed the black dumplings there, and also a big soupy hockey puck-shaped dumpling that was crispy on the outside and a little hard to eat but great flavor.
The Sichuan place was kind of a bust – the one we wanted to visit originally was closed when we visited, so this was an emergency backup. Nobody spoke English here, and we needed to gesture and point, but we could order via a website on our phone and that helped with translation. The foods were overly greasy – and not so spicy, but of course we chose the mild level on the menu out of caution. There was a strange miscommunication when I was halfway through my Blue Girl beer – the staff seemed to want to explain that they had a special price for two beers. Since I was planning on ordering another one (Kuniko’s drink was bigger than her head) I gestured that I would indeed like a second beer by showing two fingers, but that just got me two additional beers. Then they took them to the fridge to keep them cold, and I didn’t have a way to request the beers that I already had ordered (rather than a completely new beer). This kind of confusion is fun if you don’t mind the risk of paying more – and in the end I drank three beers and paid for three.
We also visited a recommended noodle shop, awarded a Michelin star, and walking by previously had shown us that there would be quite a wait. We got lucky once and walked by after dinner, and the line was almost gone. We got to share a table with a couple other foreigners, and we ordered dry noodles with shrimp eggs and also a plate of dry noodles with won tons. The crowded environment had people rushing around and pushing by us and the staff were a little rude and maybe overwhelmed by all the business they were doing. Sometimes the Michelin star can be a curse I suppose. The food itself wasn’t so special (to us) and so we left a little underwhelmed by the experience.
It wasn’t only restaurants on the first day – we also walked around to burn calories. We averaged about 25,000 steps per day, which is not bad at all. We walked to the waterfront to take in the other side of Hong Kong across the water, walked through the glitzy brand name district (where we did some recon of the ferry terminal that we would use the next day), and walked through a big shopping area entirely taken over by middle eastern and south Asian shops and restaurants. It was a completely different atmosphere there – full of great exotic aromas of curries and spice, with suspicious-looking money changers and long lines to take the elevators upstairs (were there cheap rooms up there?) I liked the vibe but Kuniko was less impressed – it felt a lot like a little slice of a developing country.
The next day we’d be heading by high speed ferry to Macau, so we headed to bed on the early side to get our rest.
