Results of "Name That "Food!!!" and a brief update.

Today we leave Hong Kong and in honor of the occasion, we are announcing the winner of the Name That Food contest. We will be flying to Bangkok, Thailand this afternoon before heading to Siem Riep (and Ankor Wat), Cambodia tomorrow. Our Thai layover is basically to change from a plane to a bus and then we are off! We will be spending a few days at Ankor Wat before heading to the capitol, Pnom Penh, and into Vietnam.

Now, less the suspense be too great... read on for the contest winner!

See the Final Scores and read the full explanations...
Well, it was a close contest, but in the end the winner was... Jennie! Thank you all for participating, though. We were quite pleased with the number and quality of entries.

The final tally was:
Jennie:5
Morgan:4
Neener:4
Busy Mom :3
Jason and Melissa:2
Mom Feenstra:2
Queenie: an honoary 4, one for each thing she hasn't eaten)

So here is the break down on all these lovely items easily found in Hong Kong. We should put the photos with the explanations again, but uploading all those photos is way too much work- just open two Internet windows!

1) Sea Cucumber (There are barrels of these things all over Hong Kong and they actually look about as disquisting as the picture. They are shriveled, oddly colored(green/brown), and often look very moldy. We stared at them for a while before finally building up the courage to ask "What the heck is that thing?" Jen- how did you get this one right??)

2) Chicken Feet (Easily purchased at most grocery stores. Though we had a hard time finding grocery stores, and it seemed that the 7-11s and other convience stores are much more common. Are grocery stores a western trend then?)

3)Dried Sea Snake (No ladies and gentleman these weren't the skins but the actual snake. These weren't quite as common, maybe because they look quite scary, but we saw them in a number of places. I've never really liked snakes and seeing these things certainly didn't help with that. Probably used for soup.)

4)Bird's Nest (These are EVERYWHERE, literally everywhere, and there are signs advertising the quality/price of a specific store's bird's nest. Now we originally thought that it must be an (bad) english translation of a chinese food but we were wrong. The small flaky things inside the pretty glass jars are actually swallow's nests taken from cave walls and imported from Thailand and elsewhere and used to make a Chinese soup. The delicacy is supposed to be full of nutrients. We never quite got up the nerve to eat the things though we talked about it often. Also we found some places that would add other ingredients to the bird's nest, i.e. bird's nest dipped in honey, or bird's nest with mango, etc... weird.)

5)Sea Horses (Nothing really to add here, just cute little sea horses in plastic bags on the side of the sidewalk. Probably used for soup.)

6)Lizard Kabob (Never really quite sure how you eat the thing, but it is what it looks like: a lizard on a stick. We've seen some pictures of these where the lizard is about two feet long! Although the lizards we saw were normally only in the 6-8 inches category. Maybe used for soup? Mmmmm, dried lizard soup?)

7) A pile of shark fin (These were also everywhere. Hong Kong is known for its shark fin soup ,and man did they have alot of fins. Normally they were put into cases or barrels but sometimes they just made a massive pile of fins and let you sort through and find the fin you want yourself; how thoughtful!)

8)Lily Petals (Didn't know you could dry and eat these... but then again there were alot of things I didn't know you could dry and eat till this trip.)

9) A massive shark fin (So most stores that sold shark fin had a massive (3-4 feet) fin on the wall behind a case with a red bow. It's as if they are advertising the quality of their shark fin over the other 30 shark fin sellers on their block, but since everyone else has one too... it seemed to defeat the purpose.

And that's it- thanks for entering and we will contemplate a special something for Jennie... perhaps we can grab some birds nest on our way out?!?