The other day, I picked up a fork and knife for the first time in quite a while. I dropped more food than I’m proud of on myself and thought it might be worth mentioning, at least for a little laugh.
In case you couldn’t tell by that last statement, I use mostly chopsticks here for eating and was a little more than surprised when I found out that a certain skill of mine had been regressing as I became more attuned to the alternative.
Back home, I always use forks. Though I eat a good amount of pseudo-Chinese food at home, if I’m given the choice between a fork and chopsticks, the fork always wins out. At restaurants, I’d never go so far as to ask for a fork if chopsticks are the only things sitting on the table, but I definitely had a preference.
So what do I prefer now? I don’t think I really care; I just know that I need to work on my fork skills when I get back home to mitigate the potential for embarrassment.
As for the food here, I must say that for the expectations set out for it, it hasn’t been so great. The food itself is fine, but it’s nothing different from Chinese food back home. The only thing that seems consistently good is street food. The only problem with that is I have trouble finding convenient street food, or street food period, in Hong Kong. I know it’s out there, and I know I like it, it’s just that in Mainland China it’s so much easier to get street food and it’s so consistently cheap.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Friday, November 6, 2009
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When I lived in Hong Kong in the 50's and 60's I loved the street food vendors that sell the "stinky tofu" close to our apartment. Actually, I don't know why people named it "stinky tofu", a literal translation from Chinese, because it was not stinky to me at all. So James, have you tried the "stinky tofu" yet?
ReplyDeleteAnother street food vendor I loved sold hot sweet potatoes cooked in I believe charcoal. Those were the days when my mom and I walked through narrow roads shopping in Kowloon at dusk surrounded by the sweet aroma of hot yams. I was only ten or eleven...wishing I have been able to stayed in Hong Kong longer.
I didn't use the chopstick the right way until I was in my teens. I held them like one would hold pencils for the longest time. My older sister always picked on me for using them the wrong way, but who cares when you are a kid and it seemed to have worked perfectly well.
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