Hong Kong 2016- First day in HK Day 2

Before you think I skipped a day, I didn’t.  I left Canada on May 3 and landed in Hong Kong on May 4 local time, so the next day it was already May 5.  Yes I might be silly to take a later flight, but I am not a morning person at all.  Day 2 was filled with crazy running toddlers, to what traditional Hong Kong markets look like.  Let’s get into what happened on my day 2 shall we? (/ ‘з’)/

Falling asleep pretty much right when I got to my uncle’s place, I woke up at 7 am.  7 AM!  DAFUQ AM I AWAKE SO EARLY FOR.  The twins were awake also, just chillin’ and smacking their toys everywhere.  This was the first time they have met me and vice versa. HAHA look at them.  They look like their thinking “Uhhhh mom… who is this giant tree with glasses staring at me?”

MOM… I’m not too sure about this.  Seriously.. and what is that giant black box thing looking at me so creepy.

The younger one is always mean mugging.  It’s pretty funny actually because her cheeks are chubbier then the eldest one, so it’s extra cute when she’s looking at you with suspicion (which is all the time).  Relax kids, you’ll warm up to me after I fed you a few times and wipe your bum.

So my aunt wanted to take me out and take the kids out to go play at the nearby community center playground at noon.  After I ate breakfast and had some time to kill, I decided to go downstairs to the Gudetama shrine and pick out EVERYTHING.  No just kidding… well I actually almost picked up everything HAHA.  Look at all that gude happiness!!

Yes, this totally happened. $21 CDN well spent in my opinion kekeke.

Something I have noticed in Hong Kong, there is always some type of gift with purchase or “collect X amount of stamps and redeem something for free”.  When I was there, Le creuset was all the rage.  I have no idea why but even 7-11 had a set of spoons, chopsticks and bowls as their gift with purchase. With every $20 HKD you spent, you got one stickers.  I easily got 11 stickers in one go HAHA.  You needed 18 stickers to redeem.

This was another mini haul I got after we went out to the supermarket and I bumped into another 7-11 with more gudetama stuff.  Awwww yeaaa….

So my aunt, the twins and I went out to the market downstairs to buy some groceries.  Hong Kong doesn’t seem that unfamiliar since where I live in Vancouver, it is pretty much the same thing with the saturation of Chinese people in my area.  It is nice to see my homeland but one thing always screams in the back of my mind, how are people not getting food poisoning?  The temperature is so hot in Hong Kong but butcher stalls just leave raw and cooked meat like that.  I don’t get it.  Oh trust me… before I came, I remembered to pack probiotic pills JUST in case.

If your coming to Hong Kong in hopes of everything to be fancy, high tech like North America, this might not be the place for you to come and visit.  This is real Hong Kong people.  Kinda dirty, shocking and sometimes you won’t encounter the nicest people but there is a certain charm to it.  This market is already considered pretty clean in my opinion.  You haven’t seem nothing yet LOL.

And if your squeamish about seeing hanging chicken heads, get used to it because this stuff is fresh as it can get.  And chicken feet is a thing here.  Yes we do eat it for dim sum.  Personally I don’t anymore but I used to love it as a child.

Fruit stalls lined up with tons of fresh and exotic fruits. YUM!

Durian, the king of fruits.  If you hate someone, you can easily murder them with the shell or just lock the room and cut open the durian for them to smell.  Force feed them one piece at a time MUAHAHA.  No but seriously, I don’t get why people are so scared of eating this fruit.  Yes there is a pungent smell but it’s not that bad.  As my parents would say in cantonese, “don’t be a p*ssy and just eat it.  Stop being so damn picky”.  Okay they didn’t say it in that exact phrase but the same meaning.  I mean they are right.  It’s food, eat it.

I unfortunately couldn’t walk around the market because the baby stroller was the size of a dinosaur and I can’t get through the narrow walk ways.  So I’ll just take pictures at my little corner.

This stall sells dried products such as dried veggies and my favourite, Chinese sausage!  YUMMM.  Yea yea, insert penis joke here -_-.  No but seriously, if you are ever in a runt and don’t know what to eat for dinner, pop a couple in with your rice cooker, fry and egg and cook some bak choi, boom!  Dinner.  Season the rice with a little bit of soy sauce and you have yourself a nice meal.

Whoo that is a lot of eggs.

We then went to the big air conditioned (yes I have to emphasize that because AC is like gold… it’s so hot here!) mall and she went into a store to buy ramen.  Not sure if it was slightly cheaper here or something, but she bought three bags.  I also saw this!  My mom’s favourite sweet treat is Kit Kat, so I took a picture of this Kit Kat ice cream cone to make her jealous KEKE.  I never got to try it because I thought it was too expensive for just 3 cones but I’m kind of regretting it now.

At the entrance of the supermarket, there was this long cake thing.  I’ve seen this cake on Youtube before.  I think it originated from German and it’s a cake where you bake it by having this long rotating bar in front of a open oven and they would pour the batter onto the bar.  They keep doing that and keep creating layers until it is like that.  Let me know if you know what cake I’m talking about.  I could be completely wrong and they just shoved this one onto a stick and called it a day HAHA.

Wow, twins really are alike in many ways.

One of the most exciting things exploring a new country is to see what odd things they have.  I love going to the supermarket because I can always find different flavours of chips, drinks and such that I wouldn’t be able to get in Canada.  Haagen-Dazs here in Hong Kong, they have a whole freestanding store and also have exclusive flavours in supermarkets like this one here which is a lychee and rose flavour.  I never bought this myself since I found $70 HKD for a small tub of ice cream to be too expensive.

They even have vita soy milk in giant 1 L bottles.  WAHHH!  If you don’t know, Vita drinks are pretty much a staple in Hong Kong.  To me, Vita lemon tea is childhood, it IS Hong Kong.  So dramatic but it’s true.  This soy milk isn’t anything special and definitely doesn’t taste as good as fresh soy milk.  It kind of is like slightly watered down fresh soy milk.  Doesn’t sound appealing but I do like the brown version (wheat I think?).

After going to the supermarket, we went back home to drop off the groceries and made our way to the playground so the twins could roam around with other kids.  I’m so jealous of Hong Kong community center.  The ones here in Canada look like crap compared to the ones in Hong Kong.  I mean, they even have a frinkin’ amusement park looking thing for them to play in.  Not only that, the whole place is sanitized every hour and there are staff members there at all times.  Unfortunately, there were some older kids running around like they drank 3 bottles of soda and not being mindful of others around them, especially super young ones like these babies.  It’s so rude. It infuriates the Canadian in me knowing these kids aren’t even taught the basic manners.  I had to block my nieces from so many reckless running kids, I almost wanted to just kick them across the room for being an asshole.

There was even this one kid that wasn’t looking at where he was going, bumped into my aunt and fell.  He had the audacity to try and blame it on my aunt.  Luckily my aunt is a strong women and told the kid he was being stupid and should watch where he is going next time. KEKEKE tell em aunt. There is a clear sign that says NO RUNNING anyways.  Ugh… kids.  Not a fan.

And then there was this odd ball using me as a tree and climbing while looking at me with curious eyes. Whatsup kid. LOL

After that fun event (kill me now…), the madness was over in an hour and we headed home (thank god).  I was pooped.  I’m definitely not ready to have kids.  Give it about ten years or never. We went home and I rested for a bit but decided it was a bit too early to call it a day, so I went downstairs to go to the mall and check out my stomping grounds for the next three weeks.

I came across this Sanrio store and saw my soul mate.  Didn’t want to buy anything because it was super overpriced, but I guess a picture will do.  Kekekekeke it says no pictures allowed :P.  Oh well.

There was even Innsifree and Laneige stores.  I went in in hopes of maybe getting something but couldn’t come out fast enough after finding out the prices of K-beauty is literally double Korean retail prices.  HELL to the no.

There was also a big Sasa store.  If you ever come to Hong Kong and Sasa is one of the places you want to go, trust me when I tell you that you won’t have to look for one.  There are more Sasa stores in Hong Kong then Starbucks in Canada.  It is in every street, every corner.  I also went to the biggest one in Causeway Bay but not satisfied with the selection they had.  Online shopping it is.  Also the prices are not cheap at all.  I bought a couple of Canmake products only to find out I paid double of what I could have paid getting it online.  Some products are cheap if they are on promotion, but don’t get your hopes up when you come to Hong Kong to buy cosmetics like how I was planning to.

There was also a Meji store.  Did you know Meji has cosmetics?  I did not know that.  Nothing was appealing to me and the price was too expensive for products that looked underwhelming.  Pass..

Uniqlo, another store that is highly raved by many.  I for one have no clue why people are going bananas for this store.  Everything is basic other then the T-shirt collaborations they had going on.  The material was not bad but not high enough quality to justify $50 CDN price tags.  I mean a meh belt for men was $250 HKD ($41 CDN).  That damn belt better be made of hopes and dreams with a sprinkle of unicorn fart.  Dafuq…

The highlight of that day of course, Gong Cha.  I’ve seen Gong Cha online before but never got to try it since it isn’t in Canada.  Yes Yes I know bubble tea isn’t good for you and stuff but I wanted one then and there.  I quickly learned that the way we say bubble tea in Canada (Boo Bat Lai Chai) is not the way they say it in Hong Kong.  In Hong Kong, it is called “Zhun Zhuu Lai Chai”, which is also another way of saying it but they will not understand what you are saying if you say it the Canadian way.  LOL The girl was just looking at me like I was crazy.  Ma bad….  it costed $14 HKD ($2.30 CDN).  I can get used to that price :P.

The tapioca pearls were cooked well with the al dente center.  The milk tea on the other hand didn’t have enough tea flavour in my opinion.  It was slightly too sweet and slightly too watered down. For some reason every time I drink a bubble tea, I pee 3 times in 30 minutes.  I have no idea why and sometimes I forget that.  One time, I drank one right before I went on the bus to go home.  Keep in mind, the bus ride was 45 minutes and I sat in the back of the bus where it is extra bumpy.  Lorddddd… help me now.  Half way through the bus ride, I thought I was going to either have to pee myself or my bladder was going to explode.  That was the longest bus ride of my life.  When it was finally my stop, I almost couldn’t get off of the bus.  Every step I took, I thought it was game over.  I was lucky there was a washroom right at the park at my house but it wasn’t close enough.  When I finally got my ass there, it was like heaven was on earth. Same thing happened to me that day after drinking Gong Cha.  Well not that bad but I was walking half way back home and had to pee.  We lived on the 35th floor and that elevator couldn’t go up fast enough HAHA.

When my uncle got off work, he brought home some sushi. This was the first time I saw sushi individually packaged like this.  It was so fascinating to me but also hit in the tree hugger gut.  It’s quite wasteful and there isn’t a good recycling system here in Hong Kong.  People through cans, bottles, cardboard, all in the trash.  In Canada, we recycle everything we possibly can so it hurts for me not to be able to do that in Hong Kong.

Ending the night with a nice shower, I brushed my teeth, patted the twins good night, went for my last pee and headed for bed to see what was in store for me in day 3.

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