A little bit local

Wong Tai Sin temple, amid the urban bustle

Yesterday M & myself caught up with a friend from Australia, T, who was born and raised in Hong Kong. This was a great opportunity to ask lots of questions about those Hong Kong phenomena that we have been puzzled about. Of course we didn't get all our questions answered, because that would take about a week, and would probably be a bit tiring for T.
Instead we spent a very Hong Kong day with her. We went out for yum cha, at a restaurant local to her, in a mall in Wong Tai Sin (黃大仙). We tried to get the minibus from Kowloon Tong to get there, but it turned out that we were at the wrong one of two bus stations adjacent to Kowloon Tong MTR. Perhaps it is possible to have too much public transportation!?! This was not a great inconvenience - we just hopped back onto the Kwun Tong line and got the train along two stops. Getting off at Wong Tai Sin station had the added bonus of taking us past, and at one point through, the enormous Wong Tai Sin temple. This Daoist shrine is apparently one of the most famous in Hong Kong. This was not difficult to tell, even through gwai-lo eyes, with a bustling crowd and amazing-looking buildings, as well as apparently important people walking around in fancy robes - I guess these were Daoist priests. One of the questions we asked T was about this temple and whether some big ceremony was happening on the day. 'No', she said, 'that's just normal. It's always like that. You should see it on Chinese New Year - you can't even move!'

Everyday busy in Hong Kong

Lunch was a relaxed affair, eating at a restaurant where T's Mum works, so we were well-looked after. T searched out the few vegetarian items on the menu for us (I will have to try and memorise those characters for future restaurant occasions). Typically for Hong Kong, one of these turned out to have a little meat in, but then surely no-one would want to eat something completely meatless, would they? The most interesting discovery for me, that I may have to try and recreate at home, was a type of steamed bun I've never had before, with the evocative name of Quicksand bun, because the grainy yellow  and sweet filling resembles quicksand. Very nice. We got to refine our understandings of Chinese table etiquette, for which there are many different unwritten rules. Some that I think I now know are...  always take your own small bowl to the platter of food, rather than bringing the platter to you; Lay your chopsticks on your side-plate or chopstick-rest, not on your bowl; Turn your chopsticks the other way around, if you wish to serve a friend, unless you know them very well indeed; Finish everything that is in your bowl before taking some more food. Apparently there is also a ritual involving washing your bowls and chopsticks before you start eating, but T and her Mum had apparently done this while waiting for us to arrive. One of the interesting things we learnt is that many children, when they are school, including T herself, leave school at lunchtime to come to restaurants like this, where they meet their parent(s), have a lovely cooked lunch, and then go back to school. Finally I understood why I had been seeing so many high school children streaming out of their schools at lunchtime, and being met by parents. I know that schools aren't only half-day here, so it had made no sense. I think this experience would be unimaginable to most of those children back in Australia, munching on a sandwich or two for lunch, but it made sense when we got the bill for the meal, which was almost absurdly cheap. For four of us, ordering more food than we could eat, sitting down in comfortable surroundings, the bill was HK$127 (feel free to convert this into your currency of choice).
After lunch we took a quick minibus ride to one of the fancier malls close by, Festival Walk in Kowloon Tong. This is enormous, with seven or eight levels, including a cinema and an ice-skating rink, which was pretty busy, this being a Saturday. Interestingly, it was not very crowded, unlike the mall we go to most often in Sha Tin. This made it a relaxing afternoon of window-shopping, chatting idly to T about her life as it is now, and how it was growing up in these neighbourhoods. Along the way the conversation ranged from the finer points of Cantonese grammer, to typing chinese characters in using a keyboard (a useful skill, but one that T had resisted learning, preferring instead to bribe her younger brother to type things for her!), to T's mother's complicated rules about what not to eat or drink, and when (all based soundly on Chinese medicine practice), to the finer points of toasters, rugs, jewellery, and computer technology. I admired a very nice coffee tamper made by the Royal Selangor Pewter company, whose factory I remember vividly from a tour we did in Malaysia when I was twelve. I decided ultimately that it was a little too fancy for me, and perhaps too big a leap from my decidedly un-classy plastic coffee tamper, which does a good-enough job, though delivers very little aesthetic pleasure in the process.
After what was apparently a very typical local Hong Kong day,  we contemplated having dinner together, but decided that we still too full from lunch, so hopped back on the train and headed for home, slightly better informed that when we had left that morning.