City of Towers
Thursday, May 12th, 2005Here’s the correct way to eat a noodle soup. You pick the chinese strange-looking spoon in one hand. On the other hand you hold the sticks they use instead of forks. You lower the spoon so it’s touching the soup, and picks some noodles with the sticks. You don’t really raise the sticks much - just enough to insert the noodles into the spoon. Now the noodles are comfortable in their small bowl, and you can raise them into your mouth and eat the soup while looking decent.
It may seem nice in theory, but it took me almost an hour to study and practice this. In this hour the entire chinese stall was staring at me, and the owner even offered me (twice!) a fork, which I bravely refused.
This Dim-Sum stall could be real start-up in Tel-Aviv (people, read well, you can make millions!). First, it’s only in chinese, so nobody understands what he’s ordered (at least, I didn’t understand). The menu has two parts: in the first part you have to choose two out of fifteen things, and in the second part you have to choose one out of four. All you get is an enormous bowel of soup, and as it turned out, the first list was the type of Dim-Sum (chinese word for KREPLACH) you wanted (I accidentally ordered one with shrimps and one which turned to be an octopus ball - both were really disgusting) and the second was the type of noodles (rice based or normal, thick or thin; I had the thin rice noodles - the toughest to handle with chopsticks!) in the soup.
Hong-Kong believes in towers. Even the buses here have two floors, and the only building I saw that was less than 10 floors was an episcopal church. Most buildings have at least 20 floors, some much more.
This city is truely cosmopolitan. I’ve seen - just in two roads next to Nathan’s street - stalls and restaurants for Indonesian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Indian, and even Euro-American food, and many others. I arrived here at noon (My flight was scheduled 11:30, but I arrived at Bangkok-airport as early as 9:00, so they let me on the previous flight, which left Bangkok on 9:50, so I didn’t have to wait at the airport at all), and when leaving the bus - before I had the chance to put my bag on me - immediately several indian immigrants (and one from Nepal) tried to take me to their hostels, which looked really disgusting. The nice thing is, that they are all in the same building: from floor 9 to 18, every floor houses two guesthouses, and all are fighting against one another. It took me a while to find a place that looks nice (it is run by an old chinese woman, and not by Indian guys. It looks very clean, compared to their places; it is much smaller, too.), and then I left my bag and went down a bit, to feel the pulse of the city.
The pulse is high. When you’re on the street level, and ignore the fact that you’re surrounded by towers and not by regular buildings, you see that the streets are full of people, vehicles and buses (yes, two floors) are rushing all around, and almost everywhere you look you see only neon lights. The internet is less frequent here than in Bangkok (I’m sitting right now at the ‘pacific cafe’ on Nathan street, when customers get free internet), and the city is much much cleaner.
I ordered myself a pair of sunglasses (they’ll be ready tomorrow). Right now, I don’t have the impression that it is much cheaper here than in other places, but maybe I just haven’t found the right places yet.
