Eating is how I become familiar with a city. I live on my own and find cooking for myself daunting. Eating out, even though it’s solo, offers me a welcome break from the tiring routine of taking care of myself. I love the dim sum, sweet little nibbles coming to you in bamboo containers, thrown at you by waitresses whose brusqueness is part of the experience. I’ve tasted chicken feet before but back then it felt more like a dare. This time those posed toes didn’t last long on the plate. I love the taste of it all though it does start to blend together, the delicacies of the flavores and textures overruled by your desire to scarf it down like the locals around you. I’ve eaten nothing too “strange” and hesitate using that word as it implies that I am a tourist to this place that is now my home. I feel excluded by many of the restaurants around me, only displaying their food in long vertical strands and not including pictures to help me out.
Eating is a communal experience but food is solitarily consumed. You buy your food from food counters and eat amongst throngs of people coming on going. When you eat sitting at a round table with a lazy Susan in the middle you bend over the bowl to ensure you can slurp it all up.
The taste in Hong Kong runs sweet. Bakeries sell sweet breads and the chips at the 7/11s display honey proudly embracing that sweet and salty pairing.
Ive developed a taste for the variety offered to me though I crave the specificities of my previous posts. The sweet condensed milk tea in Madagascar. The white cheese in my tortillas in Mexico. The avocado slices over pizza slices in South Africa. Polish pierogies with caramelized onions dripping in grease. Sweet soy sauce over everything from Indonesia. Now to my list I can add char boa sui. I can add the fresh Vietnamese foods I get on my way home. I can add the sweet and sour pork that satisfies that American Chinese food desire.
I can’t wait for more things to come