Che Kung Temple

During the Chinese New Year celebrations, you will visit temples to help change or maintain your luck in the new year. Che Kung temple is a famous temple where people go to spin a fan-bladed wheel of fortune, which, will bring good luck when turned three times. People also buy pin wheels to help change their luck using the same belief.

As you enter the temple you will see the smoke from incense hanging in the air like a fog. As you'll see from my photos it's an organized chaos of how people light up their incense offerings.

After the incense offerings, we went to spin the fan-bladed wheel of fortune and to bang on the drum to let the gods hear our wishes, before entering the temple. There you see a huge statue of Che Kung, where people continue their offerings to him. I didn't know it at the time, but photos aren't allowed there. So luckily I took a few before I was told not to.

You can also shake a bamboo cup containing fortune sticks. As you shake it you keep in your mind what you are asking about; family well being, fortune, health, etc. You keep shaking until one and only one falls out. If more fall out, you try again until only one falls out. Each fortune stick has a number that you exchange with an interpreter for a corresponding piece of paper, and the soothsayer will interpret the fortune written on the paper for you according to what you ask. Keep in mind not all soothsayers are the same.

Unique English of the Week

Parks are great places to relax and have fun with the kids. Well, until you find out what you can and cannot do in them.



Hong Kong Tidbit: There is little grass in Hong Kong, when you do see any 9/10 times you can't touch it.

My kids have actually been "told" to stay off the grass at a park.

I guess having "selective language modes" help a little in times like this. I wish you could have seen the facial expression when I used the words, "dude," and "man," when asking what all the fuss was about.

Weird Food Stuff of the Week

There's a restaurant chain called Din Tai Fung. They have branches spread across the world here and there. It's a Taiwanese version of Shanghai cuisine (confusing enough for you?). Now, having said that I want to let you know my most favourite dumpling, ever.

"Siu lung bao"





A steamed dumpling filled with pork and crab morsel that is floating in soup. The dumpling is rolled out so thin that as you pick it up, you wonder how it's holding everything together.

Eating it is an art. You should never pop it into your mouth, unless you're like Ralph.

"It taste like burning!"

Din Tai Fung offered instructions on how to enjoy this most perfect of all dumplings.



I did ask if they had one in English, but they didn't. So here's my take on it.

1) Enjoy the visual presentation and check which are intact. A leaky dumpling isn't the most enjoyable.


2)Carefully use your chopsticks to pick the dumpling out of the bamboo steamer by the twisted top. This is the thickest area of the dumpling. This way you don't pierce or break the dumpling and lose the soup.


3) Here you can dip the dumpling into black rice vinegar.

4) Bite the top off and let the steam out (remember Ralph? Don't be a Ralph). Here some like to suck out the soup or devour it whole. Personally, I like tasting the soup first.




 

New Videos of how to make them dumplings.

More Robot Love

Still going through a slew of photos and picked this one of a blind box collection of Macross (and for some of you, Robotech) figures. I picked this up from a old junk toy shop in the middle of Hong Kong. Can't recall where, since there are hundreds of them scattered throughout. For $15 HKD (divided that by 7.6 to find out the Canadian dollar equivalent), how could I go wrong?

The detail and paint job of the 6" figure is amazing. There's airbrushing details for $15 HKD?

Um, this booklet isn't for this figure.

Whatever. Still cool to me.

Find things like this reminds me how I used to walk by the toy shops in the Asian malls back home. Priced high, but oh so desirable. Much like my desire to nab the Gaiking Revoltech figure back then, which I got the open faced one from Macau (click here for that post), I can without much slaughter to my wallet.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

I'll let you know after I fill my shelves with robot love.

Shenzhen, China

Took a small trip to Shenzhen, which is an hour bus ride out of Hong Kong. Since it's close, many Hong Kongers go there since the HKD goes further. We didn't go there for sight seeing, but to kick back and relax and visit a family member from Toronto. He's an Expat there currently. We did go to a family spa called 678 International Club. Sorry folks, pictures weren't allowed for obvious reasons). There are massages, saunas and lounge chairs where you can watch TV, while eating the endless fruit buffet--that's served to you. If you feel active there's ping pong and the billiards tables. If you're hungry you can order at the restaurants there as well. As for choosing your masseuse, that was an interesting experience. They have a touch screen computer where you scroll through profiles of the various trained masseuses, all of which are female. The best way I could describe the profile photos was the comment I made to our relative, "these looked like clothed dirty pictures of women." His response, "yeah, that's how it is here." I had to ask, "this IS a family place, right?" He just smirked and clicked on a girl that, as he said, "she looks like the one that can take care of you."
 
"O...kay."

I asked for a shared room with my wife, since I don't speak Mandarin. No other reason. Really.

After that we went to a mall to have dinner. Didn't take much photos, but did get some geek shots of a DC Comics clothing store.

At first I was wondering if this was a shop that was selling fake stuff.

Apparently it wasn't, as I was told. They had the proper DC logo and the trademarks where they should be. No spelling mistakes etc. So that's a good thing. I would have taken more shots, but was told that I couldn't. Why? Cause they didn't want people counterfeiting the product. Well, that's what I was told anyway.


One of the dishes ordered for dinner was interesting.

 Pork bone soup.

Sounds innocent enough, right?

 

What's this? A plastic glove and a straw?

They're used to suck on bone marrow. That's right, bone marrow.

It tasted like how I thought it would. Liquid meat with the mixed flavours from the ingredients tossed in to make the soup. What you can't hear from the photos are the phlegm like sounds that we were all making, as we tried to suck out the bone marrow. Not as hard as sucking a McDonald's milkshake, but hard enough.

I was told it was easier to do if I added soup, which I did. Did it help? A little. I found that it was more for an alternative means to drink soup.

That's how we spent our Easter holidays. Getting massages and sucking on bone marrow. The kids got their chocolate eggs before all of that (of course one of the chocolates eggs was for me).

Oops! I forgot about the photos from my Blackberry.

We had Peking duck for lunch. I'm not going even think about the cholesterol that I took in with each bite. Man, BBQ duck is wicked tastey.

We took a trip to a place called Book City. Think of the biggest bookstore and times it by five. We were walking around for a couple of hours and still didn't do it all. I did pick up something I've always wanted to read, The Little Prince. Kind of a weird reading list I'm coming up with these days.

Currently I'm reading Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man and plan on getting through Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run, then The Little Prince.