Anonymous Hong Kong eateries

This was originally written for my friend Jemma's food blog, because I wanted to try something different and failed. I'm mainly re-posting it here because it's annoying having it wafting around in my drafts.


Eating blind has mostly been a rewarding experience in the various non-English speaking countries I've lived in over the past 18 months, though it carries risks. I won't go into some of the disgusting things I've eaten by accident here.

But for a change, I was visiting Hong Kong with someone who spoke the dialect, and could help me understand what I was putting in my mouth. Unfortunately, it turned out she couldn't read Chinese, so most of the time we were back at square one with the blind leading the blind. At least our senses of taste were still working, so here are three random, anonymous dining options from Tung Choi Street in Hong Kong's ridiculously bustling Mong Kok district.

There's my goddamn escalator!

When I was a kid, I loved escalators. Yeah, me too, you might be thinking. But you didn't love them like I did. You didn't get the same exhilarating feeling when you stepped onto the runway and watched it concertina up into a black, ridged metal step, now fully formed through a process of memory or mechanisms you couldn't understand.

Maybe because your nose was closer to the ground in those days, or you sense of smell hadn't been rendered impotent by too many microwaved cottage pies, in your memories you can smell the metal, before that exciting, nerve-wracking final stretch when the stair collapses in on itself and you perfectly time a death-defying hop over the curb or risk definitely going under like your mum told you would happen once and you unquestioningly believed, because why would she lie?

Maybe you did like escalators that much. The thing is, I liked them for a long time, well into my 20s and into my Edinburgh years, before a few too many trips to the desolate Ocean Terminal shopping centre in Leith, riding up and down the cobwebbed escalators while I waited for a friend to finish her shift at the Vue and get me in free to some shit stoner comedy film or other, finally destroyed the magic. Since then, I've ridden escalators much too frequently around the world in cities with subterranean transit systems, from Athens to Tokyo. The dream is over. Escalators are just moving stairs. I got over it.

So I was excited at the prospect of riding the world's longest escalator system in Hong Kong and trying to rekindle this childhood enthusiasm, because let's face it, I could do with a bit of that. This escalator turned out not to be affiliated with the Big Buddha after all, but located in the central district of Hong Kong Island, imaginatively called Central.

Where's my goddamn escalator?

At some point in the last 23 months, someone told me there was a big Buddha statue up on a mountain in Hong Kong that you can visit, and someone else independently told me Hong Kong was home to the world's longest escalator. I assume that's what happened anyway, but for some reason or other (wishful thinking or idiocy - probably a sprinkling of both) I'd been convinced for some time that these entities were one and the same.

Needless to say, as someone who had a genuine passion for escalators in his youth, I was pretty excited when I had the opportunity to visit this tantalising attraction myself, and crestfallen to discover I was absurdly wrong.

It was only when I got about half-way along the satisfyingly long, multi-tiered cable car ropeway to the mountain village of Ngong Ping (where the Buddha lives) that I realised how impossible an escalator would be in this situation, and how ridiculous I must have sounded when I arrived at Tung Chung station, disappointed to see no signs directing me to the escalator and getting my friend to translate 'escalator' into Cantonese to baffled silence. Oh well, the cable car ride was pretty good. Actually, it was ace.

Hong Kong - The Edinburgh of the East

So it turns out Hong Kong isn't 'the Singapore of the North,' as I'd been expecting, but bizarrely makes me feel like I'm back in Edinburgh. From paradoxical Scottish street names and First buses complete with distinctively unpleasant purple-n-turquoise interior decor to the city's persistent use of fireworks long after most people have become jaded by the expensive spectacle, this place made me feel oddly nostalgic for early morning work buses. I've got to get out of here.

The comparisons fall pretty flat after that, but that's fine. The lazy journalistic device of superficially comparing one place with another place is never obligated to stand up to scrutiny, though Hong Kong's history as a British colony at least means this comparison holds more water than Chiang Mai being 'the Chester of Thailand' just because there's a wall around it or Singapore being 'the Isle of Wight of Malaysia' just because it's at the bottom.

There are also more white people here than I expected, which always surprises me after I've got so used to being around Asian people. Though if you're racist, blind or an idiot, you could make a wry point about Britain basically being a Chinese colony these days, right? Ha ha! Please stop reading my website.

Down with this sort of thing!

Dave's certainly not happy about... something or other

Hong Kong hadn't been on my radar until recently, when I started to get the feeling that my time in Asia was drawing to a close and it seemed a bit remiss not to get China out of the way first. What with it being a bit big as well as massively influential on most of the cultures and countries I've seen over the past 18 months, which you're probably too racist to distinguish anyway. I've basically been in China for ages, right?

The main reason I didn't bother with Hong Kong until now is that I assumed it'd be very similar to Singapore, which is comfortable enough as a sanity/sanitary stop between jaunts in South East Asia, but isn't the sort of place I need to see repeated. But there's really not a lot of similarity, beyond both places wholeheartedly embracing capitalism to the most merciless degree possible. Oh, and they're both predominantly Chinese - but where isn't, right?

But there's just 34 years left before this Special Administrative Region is absorbed into the rest of China, and that might be what those gargantuan demonstrations and marches were all about when I coincidentally arrived in Hong Kong on the anniversary of the establishment of this weird and confusing one countries, two systems system. I don't know, I don't speak Cantonese, do I?