I, of course, immediately dismissed his opinion. I mean, sure, he’s a fluent Chinese speaker and he’s lived for years in Taipei, Beijing and Shanghai – but Cantonese food and specifically Cantonese food in Hong Kong? What did he know? Pfft.
So I continued to go to Hong Kong and he continued to say “you gotta go to this place on Ship Street and get the chicken” and I continued to ignore him to go instead to my favorites and hang out with my friends.

However, I was down there (again!) this weekend – over the May Holiday, and I was meeting up with Wee Ling for dinner on a Monday night . . .and I actually couldn’t figure out a place to go.

So a couple of texts to CP, and he had no idea what the restaurant was called, but some searching on OpenRice revealed – a ha! Wing Hing Restaurant.

An aside here – in the ten years since I’ve left Hong Kong, characters of micro-neighborhoods have shifted. Wanchai has become a much cooler place, with restaurants and bars and nice boutiques lining the likes of Star Street and Ship Street. In fact, up and down Ship Street is a whole row of nice Western restaurants. Lan Kwai Fong, on the other hand, seems to have inherited the old Wanchai crowd. Loud, drunk, in the street, sloppy. While the old Lan Kwai Fong banker crowd seems to have moved up the hill to Wyndham Street and there’s now a lot more people in SoHo/Mid-Levels around Staunton Street/the Escalator than I remember.

Anyways, Wee Ling and I agreed on going to dinner at Wing Hing and boy are we glad we did.

First, shirmp and eggs. One of my favorite Chinese comfort foods, Wing Hing does a particularly nice version of this, with the right mix of runny egg and dry egg and GIANT shrimp.

Then some water spinach in soup with conpoy (dried scallops) and then beef brisket curry (which was very average)

Finally the star: spring oil chicken. And it was indeed, excellent, as CP had mentioned all those years ago.

There was a lot of other dishes to try – and while I’m not sure I’d come back every time I’m in HK, I would definitely return especially for the eggs and the chicken. The razor clams looked good too.

Wing Hing Restaurant
G/F-1/F, Pao Yip Buildling, 7 Ship Street, Wan Chai Hong Kong
2866 7299

Damage – about 250 HKD for 2 people.

So aside from craving all the Japanese food to be had in Japan, I landed in Narita with an odd desire for SPAM Musubi and Loco Moco. And what do you know – in Shibuya, there’s a branch of L&L Hawaiian Barbecue. (In actuality, I ran across three separate Hawaiian restaurants in the Shibuya/Ometesando/Harajuku corridor alone).

So I stopped by for a plate lunch.

L&L Hawaiian facade – right next to Tokyu Hands (best store in the world)

SPAM – with pictured musubi on the label

Interior shot

Loco Moco and No Reservations on the iPad

SPAM Musubi

So was it any good? Well, I’m not sure good is the right word for it. A Hawaiian plate lunch, by nature, is salty, filling comfort food. For example, the loco moco I ordered is a hamburger patty, covered in gravy and sunny side up eggs served over rice. Its bachelor chow. Tasty – but I’m not sure other people would really enjoy it. Maybe Hawaiians and Hawaiian obsessed Japanese. As for me, I did enjoy it, but I think that’s partially because I was tuned into Hawaii after watching half of season 2 of Hawaii Five-0 AND the No Reservations episode.

L&L Hawaiian BBQ
Japan
Shibuya (Tokyo, Japan)
12-12 Udagawa-cho
Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-0042 Japan
Phone: +81-3-3476-1941
Next to Tokyu Hands

First off, Tokyo. Returned to my favorite ramen place in the entire world, So Kan To.

I don’t think I really need to talk again about the attention to detail to making a simple pork broth noodle soup – I mean there’s entire movies which state it more eloquently than I can in my simple blog. But the pork toru buta ramen is reason enough to move to Tokyo.

Of course, some katsu-don was eaten.

Cyndi Lauper is coming! (to Japan)

It was SNOWING in Tokyo

Then we headed up to Nagano – Hakuba where it was snowing even more!

Evan at lunch

The water was delicious.

The Japanese face mask – very useful when it was snowing.

Then we had some yakitori – which was amazing

And then the second night, we had an amazing chanko-nabe meal. That’s right sumo wrestler food. This was so unbelievably tasty, and yet an under-represented portion of Japanese cuisine. I mean I had only heard of it via Tony Bourdain’s book – but I’ve never seen a chanko-nabe restaurant outside of Japan, but now I’ll be on the look-out. It’s basically Japanese hot-pot, with a heavy focus on vegetables, chicken and more vegetables. Then the post-cooking broth is used to make soba and the diner finishes off with a big bowl of soba noodles. During a sumo tournament, wrestlers only eat it with chicken, but since neither Evan nor I were in line to complete in a sumo tournament, there were also pork meatballs.

More snow.

A return to Tokyo meant a return to Hina Sushi as well as Komen for more ramen.

Not really a whole lot of conclusions to draw except how much I enjoy Japan!

I realize that this blog really has consistently been a love letter to Hong Kong . . . well, deal with it. Because I do love that place. So why not move back there? Costs . . .and job opportunities. However, since I’m only a two hour flight away, I will continue to go back as often as I can.

A return to Australian Dairy Company

New Apple Store

Ferrari

#occupyhongkong – which was mainly tents and only a few people. But they chose a great location – right below the HSBC Headquarters in Central

The market area around where Abbie lives (border of Causeway Bay and Wanchai)

New Year’s Eve



Crowds

I did some eating too – went back to Goldfinch’s, had an Anthony Bourdain day and went back to L’Atlier de Joel Robuchon. Will try to get up some posts about that later

Normally I would have done something similar – however back in June, I had attended Habitat for Humanity’s Brick-o-lage fund raiser in Shanghai. My friend Eric who was head of the Shanghai office of Habitat had mentioned that if I was going to go on a Habitat trip, that the project in Yunnan was really the one to go on, so several months later . . . I went to Chahe, Pu’er, Yunnan to work on a Habitat Build.

View Larger Map

So on the Monday of the holiday week, I flew into Kunming and joined the 44 other volunteers (mainly from Hong Kong, but a good number from Shanghai as well – and a few other cities, including New York, Chengdu and Beijing). From Kunming, the village we were going to was a 6 hour bus ride south.

So once we reached the hotel in Chahe – it was time for bed. Then the next three days were filled with building (and demolition). The area where we were was extremely poor, with a per capita income of around 1500 RMB per year (a little bit over $200 USD). I did feel a bit guilty using a camera (and cell phone too) both of which were over 3 years of income for these families. Because the houses in this area are under threat by earthquake and also because they’re mainly built of mud brick, Habitat is working with the partner families to replace the unsafe housing with more sturdy concrete and brick based housing, and to that, us volunteers needed to build house foundations.

Normally in developed areas, foundations are poured concrete, however, up here in the village, foundations were made by hand (er, shovel and hoe actually) mixed concrete and very large river stones, on top of packed dirt. Making foundations by hand is a lot of muscle work, especially in the sub-tropical Yunnan sun.

But I had fantastic time, made lots of friends and will endeavor to go on another Habitat trip as soon as possible. In spite of the hard work – or quite possibly because of it, the trip was as rewarding and interesting as any vacation I’ve ever been on. Despite some organizational hiccups and a less-than-stellar hotel, I would wholeheartedly recommend a volunteer stint with Habitat to anyone. It was well worth the donation of time and money, and I hope know that the partner family will really be appreciative of presence.

Here are some photos:

Building foundation by hand (pay no attention to the concrete mixer in the background – we didn’t use it)

This gives you an idea of what kind of area the village (and build was located in)

As part of the build, we also met and interacted with a lot of the villagers.

Here are the homeowners of one of the build sites:

The village was a Hani Minority village and on the second day lunch, the women came dressed in Hani traditional clothing so they could teach us a Hani dance.

This was my small team:

and the entire build with the villagers

Habitat also brought a celebrity ambassador – Hong Kong pop singer (yeah, I’ve never heard of him) William Chan

They made sure everyone got a certificate:

On the last day, we went to the nearby county seat and watched a Hani Cultural performance, however the most fun was after (and during to be honest) the performance we hung out and played with the village kids.

Also, we sang, er, Jingle Bells

If you’re interested – the rest of the photoset is here

Though rainy, its still one of my favorite places to walk around in the world.

This is Sather Tower, or the Campanile, as most students call it. Modeled after the St. Mark’s clock tower in Venice, it’s a landmark of the East Bay.

Here’s the view from the Campanile down to San Francisco Bay. On a clear sunny day, you can see across Alcatraz Island to the Golden Gate Bridge. A better view from a university campus, I don’t think can be found.

One of my favorite buildings on campus (and the oldest), South Hall houses the school of information sciences. Campus tour guides sometimes call it the Mary Poppins building, since the roof resembles the buildings used in the film.

Wheeler Hall, one of the main classroom buildings – it has the largest classroom on campus (also handy for film screenings) and all of my English classes were in this building. Unless they were in Dwinelle. Now I’m not so sure.

Sather Gate, Sproul Plaza and the ASUC

This is where the Free Speech Movement . . . and every other campus protests were initiated. Sproul Plaza, in front of campus administration. The traditional main entrance of the campus, onto Southside and Telegraph Avenue. On a quiet rainy day during Winter Break it was empty except for some fans heading to the Cal basketball game and a couple of fixie riders practicing trackstands and bicycle polo maneuvers.

More to come from Southern California.

Very excited to be home and to eat In-N-Out, fish tacos, mission-style burritos and all that. I’m sure I’ll have some photos up from this week, sometime.

More photos after the jump

Danny Zuko and Sandy Olsson (from Grease)

Haibao x Lady Gaga (Hello Kitty Dress)

Popeye and Olive Oyl:

Snooki:

The rest of the photos can be viewed here