A Potpourri of Pictures

posted/titled by josh but written by megan
Before we move into thoughts, experiences, and photos from a new country (Cambodia), we want to make a few comments on Hong Kong. First of all, we had a great time, partly thanks to our hosts (a friend of mine from Columbia and her husband).

I think one thing that surprised us about HongKong was that it was just another city. Unique, fun, beautiful and dirty, most recommendable... but another city none-the-less. I would not be writing that if I hadn't lived in New York for a while. Coming from small towns, cities were enigmas to Josh and I, but now we know what to do and how to handle them, more or less. Compared to New York, Hong Kong certainly felt as though it were squished into the size of Manhattan and then pulled up a dozen or so stories. And most of the side streets felt like Chinatown (go figure), full of people, bright signs in Cantonese, lots of vendors. The most common activities were eating and shopping. Markets are all over the place. This photo is from a night market on Temple Street on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong (the "city" straddles a few islands):What also struck us was that each market, or street, more specifically, sold its own thing. We saw the flower market, bird market (with toucans, parakeets, bird cages and everything), goldfish street, women's market, dried food street (giving us many of the photos from the "name that food" contest), shoe street, bird's nest and ginger street... Below is a photo from the goldfish street.
Read the rest...
Certainly one of the best and most beautiful features of HongKong is that it is made up of a number of green, hilly islands, and water is everywhere. Because the central part of the city is also on its own hilly island, living a bit outside of city center means you have a decent vertical drop to cover... so the city built the longest outside escalator in the world! We thought this was pretty funny. Convenient, but funny.We had a full week to explore the city, so we went to Stanley (on the other side of Hong Kong island), Lamma Island and Lantau Island. Lantau has a great gondola ride up to a big sitting buddha. The photos below are from Lamma Island, a nice place for beaches, fishing villages, and walks along the ridge. It was also our first really hot day, and we were greatly impressed and amazed by the Chinese wearing jeans and even sweaters!
View of the city where we caught a return ferry:

a woman collecting clams (there was an interesting mix of old and new here, much like hong kong itself):
Me and the view back towards where we came from (our hike was called a "family walk" and since it was sunday, it was full of families!):

Night view of hong kong (every night at 8pm the city has a laser light show using all the buildings, which works well since the city is on an island and you can view it from the Kowloon side. It's a little long and cheesy, but we decided that Times Square should definitely try its own version. I can only imagine all those lights turned off and then blindingly coming back on to a nice techno beat...):

That's all we had time to upload/write. We are now in Siem Reap, Cambodia, near Ankor Wat, heading to Pnom Penh tomorrow morning. It was quite the adventure getting here, but we will save that story for another day...

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?!?

Name that "food"

Time to play everyone's favorite game "Name that food!", the game where you attempt to identify food that we have encountered on the streets of Hong Kong for fabulous prizes! (Prizes to be determined based upon who you are and when we will actually see you next.) Post your answer for each numbered photo below in the comments section (see sample). Final answers to come in a few days. Let's see your best guesses!

P.S. Queenie Tong is automatically disqualified unless she can prove that she has never consumed any of the below mentioned "foods."

Read the rest...

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We've landed.

After a 3.5 hour flight, a 10 hour layover, a 13 hour flight, a 3 hour layover, a 3.5 hour flight, and a missing day (I still don't understand that), we have made it from Texas to Hong Kong!

Yes, there's more...
[Jetlag is making my head a little swimmy, so this post is going to be a bit travel journal-y. We'll try for more entertaining and/or thought-provoking in the future.]

Despite their length and number, the flights were uneventful. We were even screaming-baby-free over the ocean (the same cannot be said of three of our other flights). We found Korean Air to be extremely polite and accomodating. Even the food was surprisingly good (relatively speaking) and served with real silverware and china. Although, aren't metal forks more dangerous than the shampoo bottle I couldn't bring on board? One annoying thing they did that I don't remember on other trans-ocean flights was to insist that passengers eat when we were served, including raising our seats and putting up with ALL the lights back on. As for the layovers, we entertained ourselves in LAX by finding the closest LA post office using the rental car shuttles only and in Seoul by using the Internet. The Seoul airport offered free internet to transfer-ers like ourselves, something every civilized airport should consider!

HongKong itself has been great. We are staying with a friend of mine from grad school. She and her husband live in a very nice but tiny apartment in central Hong Kong, so the view is pretty impressive: We tried to stay up late last night to combat jetlag, but ended up going to bed at 7:45! We'll see how we do tonight. We had a great time exploring central HongKong today, but the full day of walking is already making the couch and TV more appealing than this computer. Stay tuned for a future Name-That-Food post with photos from today... the things we saw on Dried Food Street were something else! Oh, and Queenie, we went to that cheap, little noodle shop today for lunch! Fabulous!

(Oh, right, Texas. Let me sum up the weekend so the previous photos make sense. We stopped in Texas last weekend to help our friends Nate and Milli celebrate their wedding. We know them from All Angels Church in Manhattan and were excited at the chance to see some old friends. As Milli's family is Indian, the wedding was a bit different from the usual American fare. I, along with the other women, got my hands "painted" at the Mendhi ceremony on Friday night with beautiful designs that should last quite a few days. The party also included plenty of good food, music, and dancing, as all good parties should! The wedding on Saturday was a beautiful and colorful mix of American and Indian wedding traditions. Josh and I borrowed clothes from some of our friends from New York who had also flown out for the occasion (thank you Graham, Milind, and Bekah!). However, Josh was missing black socks, and thus the photo of his feet! Sunday we visited Fort Worth with some friends from England who were also attending the wedding. We got to see "real cowboys", just as they were hoping, and we even got in on a junior regional rodeo. I guess that's it. Congratulations to Nate and Milli!! And now we are in HongKong. Wierd...)

We are off... again!... and again!!

Ok, so a longer post is coming upon arriving in Hong Kong (talking a bit more about the trip to Dallas) but right now we have some packing to do and some sleep to get before traveling to the other side of the world. We decided that we should at least have an assortment of pictures from the last few days.

(A final photo before we left Grand Rapids.)

See the rest...

(The crowd dancing at the Mendhi party. The colors during the whole event were so vibrant.)

(The henna on Megan's hands after the Mendhi party. I think she has pretty hands..(maybe I'll get brownie points for that...))

(Nate and Milli, you can see the relief on their faces that this is finally done. )

(Josh's feet at the above mentioned wedding. This is what happens when you dress for a wedding from the random assortment of items you have in a packpack.)