Sunday, August 27, 2006

Weekend hike to the Peak

What do we do on a weekend in Hong Kong?

Start at 7:30am and hike with friends to the Peak. The only difference with the hike today was instead of turning around to walk home, we walked down the other side.
We walked from the SouthWest side of Hong Kong Island, up to the Peak, then down the Northside to Central, walked to Wanchai with a stop at an outlet sample clothes shop, then lunch, a bakery stop, and off to Causeway Bay to take the minibus home.

All told, a 4.5hr trip and that included a cappuchino and latte break at the peak, and a minibus ride home.

Of course walking and sweating for a couple of hours can bring on an appetite. So why not find a local restaurant, where we can't read the name, can't read the menu, and where the staff doesn't speak english. Remember it's all about the food, the local culture, and the people.
As long as they seem friendly and willing to put up with our smile, our pointing, and the 4-5 chinese words I know, it's all good. This placed looked interesting. They were smiling, asking us to come in. The cook was making fresh sheets of rice noodle in the window. He was also deep frying fresh chinese donuts. We asked if they had wonton, and they didn't.
Upon closer review, it looked like their specialty was Jook and freshmade rice noodle sheets. Why not give it a try, so we grabbed a table. Between the 3 of us (Robin and I and our friend, Paul), we ordered 2 bowls of fish jook, 1 bowl of beef jook, and 2 orders of rice noodles rolls. Not sure what type of rice noodle I had ordered. It turned out to be 2 plates.
Each plate had 3 rolls of the fresh sheets of noodle wrapped around fresh donuts, sliced, with some sauce on top. Everything was good. And the bill, HK$46 for the 3 of us, that's just less than $6US total. I tried to leave the HK$4 change and the lady wouldn't take it and came running outside to return the money I left.

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