The Hong Kong Wetmarkets

Although modern western supermarkets can be found almost everywhere in Hong Kong the majority of the local Hong Kong population seems to get their food from the so called ‘wet’ markets. These traditional Chinese food markets are quite the experience.

The markets sell a range of different products ranging from fruits and vegetables, poultry, seafood, cooked food and a range of dried foods such as rice, pulses and range of unknown dried products (asking the stall owner what they were didn’t help as most of the stall owners spoke very little English). At most of the stalls you’ll also see old fashioned scales hanging from the ceiling as food here is measured by old fashioned weight measurements, the catty or the boon.

The fruit and vegetable stalls look amazing with their produce stacked up neatly on wooden tables. Particularly popular are the many varieties of green leafy vegetables. Moving on from the vegetable stalls you’ll find the meat stalls. The blood stained tables and butcher and range of hooks with all sorts of unidentifiable meat cuts make for a slightly unappetising sight but it’s amazing to watch locals buy their meat and the butchers just hacking at the cuts with huge knifes.

Personally I found the seafood stalls the most interesting, or should I say confronting. In large aerated tanks there was a huge assortment of live fish, crabs, prawns, lobster and shellfish. Next to the tanks there are also boxes with ice with dead fish displayed on them. Or at least I thought they were dead. While watching the fishmongers for a while I noticed that they would slice open a fish but in such a manner that all the organs would be left in tack so that the fish was actually still breathing.

There’s no two ways about it, the food at the wetmarkets is definitely fresh but it’s also slightly confronting and you’ll need a strong stomach and a bit of gutsiness to actually buy anything there. But it’s also a great experience and it gives you a good insight into they way the locals buy their food.

See you next time. 

Annelotte

Mooncakes and Mid-Autumn Festival

Over the past couple of weeks I kept seeing advertisements for round cake-like treats (these images were literally everywhere: on the back of buses, centrefold spreads in newspapers and posters all over the MTR). I started to get curious and after a bit of research and asking around it turns out that these treats are mooncakes a Chinese delicacy that is typical to the Mid Autumn festival. These mooncakes are offered between friends and family in the lead-up to the festival.

According to Wikipedia the Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the Moon Festival, is a popular harvest festival celebrated by Chinese and Vietnamese people, dating back over 3,000 years. The Mid-Autumn Festival is held on the 15^th day of the eight month in the Chinese calendar, which is in September or early October (this year October 22^nd). The Mid-Autumn Festival is one of the few most important holidays in the Chinese calendar, the others being Chinese New Year and Winter Solstice. Traditionally Chinese family members and friends will gather to admire the moon, eat moon cakes and pomelos together. Accompanying the celebrations there are additional cultural customs such as: carrying brightly lit lanterns, burning incense, and fire dragon dances. More information about the festival can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Autumn_Festival.

Mooncakes are generally round or rectangular, about the size of the palm of your hand. The moon cakes have a thin pasty like crust and are usually filled with lotus seed paste. In the centre you will often find a yolk from salted duck eggs (yuck!) to represent the moon. If you want to see how these mooncakses are make check out this link (http://www.sbs.com.au/food/foodart/182/Mooncakes).

Since I don’t have any Chinese friends yet who will buy me one of these pastries, I set out to buy one for myself to see what all the fuss is about. As the label of my mooncake packaging was all in Chinese buying one of these cakes was a bit of a gamble. Back home I cut open the cake to find that mine (thankfully) didn’t contain a yolk but nuts of some sort. It actually tasted quite good but it was awfully sweet and only a small slice of the round cake was enough for me. Probably for the better as I later found out that these traditionally delicacies aren’t really the healthiest of snacks the with some mooncakes containing more than the recommended daily intake of sugar while others are large enough to supply one’s daily fat requirements (thankfully I only had a small slice and didn’t finish the whole thing!).

Having enjoyed the new experience of tasting the mooncakes we got into the Mid-Autumn Festival spirit and ventured out to Causeway Bay to have a look at the Lantern Festival. The lanterns were very impressive with lanterns in all shapes and sizes (see pictures below).

What an amazing festvial. I might leave the moon cake eating up to the locals but the lanterns were definitely a highlight!

Happy mid-Autumn Festival!

Annelotte

Fùnyìhng (welcome) to my life in Hong Kong

So here I am taking the big plunge into the unfamiliar territory of online blogging. Many people have gone down this road before but never before have I thought my life to be interesting enough and my writing skills adequate enough to post anything online to share with the world. So what’s changed?

Well first of all I’ve recently moved to Hong Kong with my partner and, even though I have lived in may different places around the world, this place just has so many weird and wonderful things that I feel the need to write about them and share with friends and family and anyone else interested. Secondly, for the first time in my life I am finding myself in a situation where I have so much free time I have no idea how to fill it and writing useless blogs seems to be an interesting way to fill my time. So as long while I have all of this time off I decided I might as well start writing down some of these things that I have been witnessing around me.

Before I start going into the specifics of my experiences in Hong Kong, I’d like to share some of my overall first impressions of Hong Kong: tall skyscrapers, lots of people, dead animals hanging from shop windows, more skyscrapers, illegible shop signs, hygiene mania, smog, strange unidentifiable objects in pharmacy shops (something that smells that nasty surely can’t be good for you!) and even more skyscrapers.

So far the experience has been absolutely amazing and everyday I am learning new things so dive with me into this journey and enjoy these weird and wonderful experience with me!

As they say in Hong Kong, Baai Baai!

Annelotte