Tipping really isn't a place in China (Guangzhou catch-up and food)

[Sorry about the photo formatting and typos in this. I'll edit it later. And I'll get the hang of it one day]

Ok I finally managed to upload the photos, although I've got such a backlog of blogging to do I think it may be a while before I have time to hook them up to any text, or tag them with useful information like descriptions. I've just wasted another half our on this damn computer in our hotel! This time when I started to type it tried to translate everything I typed into chinese characters assuming I was typing Pinyin. Great software and very useful under the right circumstances but infuriating if you just want to type English.

Joanne warms her hands on Coals

So finally after a reboot I'm sitting typing in the lobby of our hotel with all the clothes on I mentioned previously, as well as my gloves. I may have to take the gloves off soon and sacrifice my fingers to improve my typing speed! The lobby is about as cold as outside. The only thing that keeps the owner at all warm, through the 24/7 he appears to sit here, is the bit pot full of burning coals under him. Ok that's Joanne using the same sort of thing in a restaurant we were in yesterday.

So to the catch-up... and some food bits I missed out.

Squid Lips!!

When we first arrived in Hong Kong the first thing we ate was Indian food. A strange choice I thought, but I let Joanne decide. It turned out to be really quite good, probably because of the large number of Indian immigrants living in Chungking, where our restaurant was. The next day I wanted to be a bit more adventurous, so we had sushi for lunch, which was a bit more extreme than the sushi you get in Glasgow. I didn't get the "Fried Squid Lips" although I really wanted them when I saw that. Unfortunately we'd already just about blown our daily budget, and I'd eaten loads already. I'll make sure I have some when we re-enter Hong Kong. That evening we decided to take it up a notch again and we went into a proper chinese place where there was no English outside. They did have English on the menu

, although it turned out that it was open to misinterpretation. I saw other people eating form huge bowls and assumed that this must be the "big bowl of noodle with all item above stated". When mine arrived it was even bigger.

No way of eating it in one go. So I had to get the remainder as a takeaway an have it for breakfast.

The day that we went up the peak we ticked one of my boxes by getting some dim sum from a street vendor. Dim sum are a Hong Kong speciality, so it would have been unthinkable to miss out. They were very tasty, so I went back to order some other stuff and ended up with fried tripe with curry sauce poured all over it. Actually not too bad apart from the texture. In fact I could see why tripe appears to be popular in Hong Kong (we'd already seen in a couple of places, translated), because the texture, and whole appearance actually, is really very like the charred squid tentacles I'd had the other night in my sushi; since seafood like that is so popular it seems to make sense that tripe is too. The last in the selection were fish balls in curry sauce, which were nice enough for Joanne to bagsy them leaving me with crunchy tripe.

Elevated walkway

Then our last day in Hong Kong, which didn't make it into the blog at the time, we took a tram from one end of Hong Kong Island to the other.

The guide book (SE Asia on a Budget) said that this was as good as any Hong Kong tour you could get, and at only HK$2 per person (20p) it seemed like excellent value. It gave us a pretty good sense of what Hong Kong is about I think. Sky-scrapers.

Lots of Sky-scrapers.

And some rather cool overhead walkways, which you need to go through shops and offices to get to. I suppose the idea is that the cars aren't slowed down by any pesky pedestrians. Anyway, the tram ride convinced me that Hong Kong isn't anywhere I want to live. It's just never-ending characterless city.

Whole smoked ducks (I think) at the market

However when we got to the very end of the tram journey and got off to look for the way back, I spotted an interesting looking market, which we decided to have a wee look around. Just walking through this market was the most fun I'd had since we arrived in Hong Kong: finally a bit of real life instead of nothing but characterless commerce. The things on the right are whole smoked ducks I think. I neglected to take pictures of any of the more exotic things on offer.

Most of the smoked ducks were so whole they still had, not only their feet still on, but their heads as well. There were turtles; live of course. Apparently when something dies at one of these markets it's not fresh any more, so it just gets chucked out. I was a bit upset about the turtles at first because I thought they were endangered, although Pietro later assured me that it's only the giant ones which are endangered. Still, I'm going to look it up before I have turtle soup. The fish were all swimming around, with air bubbling through their containers, making sure they made it through the day. We even say an eel chopped in half; the half that remained was still alive, so I suppose that must have been ok.

That night we went to another chinese place and I ordered something I thought sounded fairly exotic: Congee with Sliced Pork and Pig's Blood. I had no idea what congee was, but the waiter assured me "it's like noodles". My sister, Lorraine, always talks about her favourite dish in Thailand which invoved "pigs blood", in some sort of a jelly-like state, which is apparently very nice. Anyway, it arrived, and the blood part looked very much like Lorraine's descriptions, but congee turned out to be over-cooked rice or rice porridge or something. And the dish has almost no flavour. It was very very dull even after adding soy sauce and chillis, so I decided that exotic didn't necessarily always mean "good".

Sliced pork and pig's blood congee

Pietro's apartment

Then we were in Guangzhou. As I mentioned we were helped by a friendly chinese guy as we failed to order food on arrival there. The food was pretty grim: all bones and gristle, hardly any meat. That night, after arriving at Pietro's fantastic place, I was telling him about this, the congee, and the market, etc. He said that he was surprised we hadn't seen dog at the market we went to, and that the Chinese attitude to what is good on an animal seems to be the opposite to Europeans'. He said that you can go to his local market first thing in the morning and they are selling fish heads for more than the whole of the rest of the fish, and the hooves / knee caps / neck / whatever grim bits are more expensive that the fillet steak, which is on the same animal, at that point whole. Apparently, you can then return later on to find headless, tailess, finless fish; and (cheap) steaks cast aside in favour of nose, testicle, and spleen. It's just meat, who wants that? -- it's boring! Not as much flavour as sinew, tendon, and skin.

A range of drinks, including the infamous "Great Wall"

Anyway, that night we just settled in and drank wine with Pietro, resulting in us getting up late. I got up and did the Guanzhou blog, then we went out for lunch, where we were too late to eat dimsum at the place Pietro had recommended, so we went to the muslim restaurant next door, where we ordered on very nice dish and another "chicken curry" where the meat was grim again, all bone and fat, and ribs looked rather smaller than a chicken's; rat-sized perhaps. Pietro has assured us that rat is often sold locally as chicken, so I didn't mention this until it was finished. That night we walked for ages, failing to find a particular restaurant from an online guide, but found a quite-nice Macanese place instead. When we arrived back, we drank a bottle of Great Wall cabernet sauvignan. Hmm. And some local brandy, which wasn't too bad. Also I had bought some Budweiser, only because I was shocked to find an American product so Chinese-endorsed.

But it wasn't the only one.

That night we drank more with Pietro. He was proving to be a bad influence. The next day we had intended to definitely do touristy things, but woke up late again. So we went for lunch with Pietro to the dimsum place he had recommend, actually it was more like an aquarium-cum-restaurant, where we chalked up another weird food experience: durian pastries. Durian is the large spiky fruit reknowned for smelling like drains or something. It tastes quite nice actually, but not much like a fruit; the pastries tasted like cheese an onion pies. After lunch Pietro took us for a walk round his local market, which was pretty much the same as the last one, except he was there to point out the little dogs faces sitting on the counter, and the dogs legs hanging up above them. That night we went out with all the Guangzhou couchsurfing crowd for "KTV" which is what they call Karaoke in China.

This was their Chinese New Year party, so they thought they should do something Chinese.

Pietro examining his cake at the KTV Night Guangzhou

Pietro had whipped up a couple of cakes to take along as he's a very good cook, apprently. The cakes were nice anyway. Then on to play pool

and then onto a night club.

It was here I realised that China is still behind us after all: they were playing techno from the 90s! Actually I've subsequently thought about it more and the only serious thing I can come up with is the fact the water isn't potable, which is a major thing I suppose, but that is it!

Aivic and Joanne at the flower festival

We had failed to get bus tickets the previous day due to communication problems, so we called up Aivic, who had very kindly offered to help us any time after helping us so muc hthe first day in Guangzhou. He agreed to meet us and help us buy bus tickets to Yangshuo. He didn't want anything; he just wanted to make sure we were ok. Afterwards he took us to the flower market, which appears just before Chinese New Year, as buying flowers for the New Year is traditional. Here's a photo of our good very kind and helpful friend Aivic.

The next day, thanks to Aivic we were off to Yangshuo just in time for Chinese New Year!

Oh yeah -- and you're not expected to tip in China.

written by

The Happy Couple on January 26, 2009 from Yangshuo, China

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

Send a Compliment

comment on this...