Hot Pot! Hong Kong's Food Porn...

In small Scottish towns, the only time people really gather together en masse is to daub graffiti on the walls of mosques saying ‘English Go Home’ (…?...) or to petrol bomb the family homes of suspected paedophiles and rumoured lottery winners. Moreover, it usually requires the death of an especially contemptible but wealthy relative and the promise of a free and luxurious wake banquet to encourage people to eat together in large numbers. Thankfully, this is not the case in Hong Kong.

The greatest opportunity for gluttony in Hong Kong presents itself in the many delectable ‘all you can eat hotpot’ restaurants generously splashed throughout the territory. These restaurants are essentially bruised retail units within irreversibly paralysed shopping malls but benefit quite remarkably form the delusional grandeur offered by a few rolls of chintz and a generous smattering of garish stereotypical Canton artworks…

The hotpot itself is essentially a boiling pot of stock which sits on a table-top cooker and bubbles busily into the night. The needlessly discerning customer then deliberates over which delicacies they would like to add to it and boil the bejaysus out of during the four hours of culinary insanity…

The food typically arrives as part of a sumptuously stacked mountain which is placed beside your table with the implied instruction to do whatever the hell you like with it. There are meatballs, strips of meat, meat on sticks, sticks on meat and even meat wrapped around meatballs. Oh yeah… There’s also a large array of vegetables and noodles on offer should you require some obstacles in your search for meat!

Meat, meatety, meat meat!

Hotpot is also a mightily educational experience. For example, I found out the other day that one of the worst deaths a prawn can have is to have a big stick ramned up through the arsehole region until it is poking through the scrambled brain before waiting an intolerable time for the apathetic gourmand to slop you mercilessly into the boiling bisque of doom. Worse still is the prolonged and agonising ascension to crustacean Nirvana should the stock be at a less than piping temperature!

Furthermore, it has taught me that if you are not careful, you could easily end up eating balls! Not the (arguably) harmless meatballs discussed earlier but actual ‘and this is where babies come from…’ balls! I’m confident the underlying sociology of my displeasure at the thought of indulging in balls is apparent enough to not require further discussion. But suffice to say, I just don’t want to be confronted with the realisation that something which personally brings me so much pleasure and potentially so much pain tastes ‘a little bit like beancurd’…

The very mention of beancurd inspires me to offer a warning that, if you are someone who believes appearance and taste must align when it comes to food then hotpot may not be for you. As mouth-watering as it all looks when it arrives at the table, almost everything comes out of the soup looking like old clothes being dredged from a murky muddied river. The prime example of this is beancurd sheet which at the best of times looks like old womanly forearm skin. It’s hard to salivate when this jaundiced mass is gingerly ladled from the soup and then carelessly flopped into your bowl like a mangled prostate in the hands of a keyhole-surgeon…

Of course, there is an additional element to the hotpot gathering which renders any interest in the appearance of your food irrelevant. And that joyous extra is ‘all you can drink’ beer! Admittedly, the beer is of questionable origin and may simply be the fermented piss of mainland alcoholics. However, I can guarantee that it really does the number on you when liberally consumed between portions of sheep meat and potentially dead crayfish.

But ultimately, the real jewel in the crown of the hotpot gathering is the opportunity to converge together in a civil but merry round table formation and get down to some seriously good nattering. The eclectic mix of western and local people I’m fortunate enough to enjoy these evenings with makes for some really good times and I find as I leave the ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ restaurants I’m already looking forward to my next hotpot experience…

But if you think I’ll be eating balls you can suck my beancurds!...

The One In Which Dad Bought An iPad!

My father recently purchased an Apple iPad. To the best of my knowledge, this means he can now reverse his vasectomy and obtain up to the minute information about the weather in Turkmenistan from the comfort of his vibrating armchair. If the overwhelming sycophancy being liberally spooned over this gadget is to be believed, then it seems likely that those who opt not to buy one will be survival-challenged or worse within a matter of months. However, I for one am willing to take that chance…

At present in Hong Kong it is the mid-Autumn festival. Essentially, this is an opportunity for Hong Kong people to eat somewhat unpalatable ‘Moon Cakes’ and suffer the horrors of an additional day of rest. Swarms of children roam the streets confused by this notion of a day off and struggling to come to terms with life out of uniform. Middle managers, like rampaging Scottish jaikies, conduct hastily convened meetings and rant at abandoned items of office furniture to satiate their chills at not being able to middle manage for the day…

For me, it is extremely important every once in a while to just switch off the mobile, shut down Facebook (imagine that…), abandon the emails and kick back in solitude and contemplation. And yet I still find myself in my sub-technological wilderness wondering whether anyone has updated their status on Facebook or pondering how many emails I have received offering to make my penis more presentable and penetrating to the opposite sex…

It simply seems to be the case that most of us find it incredibly difficult to accept either (a) our ability to be good company for ourselves or (b) the notion that life will go on even if we don’t get a Twitter notification from Karl from Neighbours lamenting to presence of a pube in his soup…

Possibly the greatest ally to this point is the existence and continued popularity of the Bluetooth earpiece. I find these things horrific! Last Chinese New Year, I encountered a father in a theme park bouncing his child along on his shoulders whilst conducting a minor-league business meeting. I found myself thinking: ‘Cant that wait?’…

But Bluetooth adds to this illusion that we must all be immediately available at all times to anyone who wishes to contact us. I heard a woman on the MTR berating someone for not answering her calls ‘yesterday’ and asking the person ‘where you be a?’ It turns out yesterday was a Sunday and thus both she and the caller were observing a day off and so the call could… nay should… have waited…

I knew a guy from Montrose who had a Bluetooth headset but was also famously antisocial. Factoring in the cost of the headset, the rental fees and the funeral costs, all he got for his £4500 investment was a haunting awareness that nobody wanted to be around him and a brain tumour the size of a Chechnyan landmine. But no matter how hard we tried to put it to him, he remained reticent to decry the Bluetooth headset as a redundant indulgence…

This brings me back to the iPad. My knowledge on the subject remains as hazy as my opening gambit might imply, but I believe the user subscribes to information in the form of ‘apps’. Now this to me sounds like an abridged term used by self-indulgent tossers to refer to some trendy holiday island as in ‘Yeah, me Mousey and Davie T. totally kicked the fuck of two arsehole bandits when we were in Apps last year. It was banging!’. But these ‘apps’ can be as curious as a ‘Magic Pen’ app where you can write the word ‘FUCK’ in Belgian on your iPad and only Sir Ian McKellen will be able to see it. Or there is one where Jeremy Clarkson will call out bingo numbers in inappropriately racist accents. Who couldn’t live without that?!

I for one will be sticking to my $289HKD mobile phone with no internet and a scratch in the shape of a wee boner on the top left of the screen. I don’t mean to sound self-congratulatory because I’m sure that I am missing out as a result of not being privy to the latest information at the touch of a button (or swerve of a swirling digit across a silken screen). However, when the bulk of that information is as erroneous as having Charlotte Church tweet that she ‘sicked all down herself lasr night’ I have to question whether I don’t deserve a little pat on the back…

On My First Couple of Weeks Being Mister Garr-Finn and Mister Gay-Fun!

Well it’s been one full week and half of another since I started my job as the one Western brother in two kindergartens in the north of Hong Kong – a lifetime away from the hustle and throng.

The worst part of work is I live in the city so must take the train and that sure is a pity for my patience unending is tested at length to the point where I really must beg for the strength. Who decided this city of ‘never-walk-straighters’ should be put in charge of free morning papers? And why is it so hard to look back in inspection before suddenly brutally changing direction?

But it’s nice to reach work and not have to cuss at the tangled position I’ve stood on the bus in this place where five foot ten is the norm where seats must be queued for the second you’re born.

I work nine ‘til two on three of my days and for about seven hours in the other place so it’s hardly a stress but NO… HANG ABOOT!... I’ve just been told that change is afoot. For two of those days I must now work ‘til three but for three times my wage which is alright by me! Before sharpening your knives in angst at the ease of my new working schedule take a moment and please consider the down sides to of the job that I do, believe me there’s many but here are a few…

My tip from the top if you’ve pricked up an ear and consider you might want to try this career is take all that’s sibilant, fricative too and cast it away from the lessons you do. The sea of saliva these sounds will create shall be cast from the mouths as the cherubs orate and you’ll startle with fricative sibilant hate as you lose all control and spit out a ‘FFFUCK SSSSAKE!’.

And when they request you be closely attending do not even think about crouching or bending for the moment you do the unknowing rotters explode from within with a volley of snotters. When posted far north I was told of the scenery, was this what they meant when they talked up the greenery?

A further lament concerns arriving in the morning and catching the sight of a child without warning whose outermost layers once brilliantly white are now caked in his meal from the previous night. This is a hazard of first week nerves and a sight to behold that no-one deserves. I feel for the auxiliary staff most I’d say for their job is to spirit the vomit away. I thought I’d be polite and buy them a cake but they were diabetic and made the mistake of cutting it up for some children aged four who gobbled it up and then threw up once more…

Then there’s the problem of going to the can which is awkward for me given I am a man. In a mainly female working space the ladies staff toilet is quite commonplace but for the occasional man who enters the fray he is not welcome there in any way. Imagine my horror imagine my gloom at being told I’d have use the little boys room! And so when I go to bog in one school I have to sit down for a piss or a stool for the walls of the booth are about four feet high which is more than two feet from the height of my eye. There’s one adult sized toilet that I’m grateful for as the ones for the kids are a foot from the floor!

But if that’s as bad as it gets who’s complaining? I’m still positive even though it is raining. I just went down to the convenience store where a man and a woman were on the shop floor and he seemed determined to garner her number but she seemed determined she wouldn’t cave under. She relented as I left and read her number off and reminded him squarely ‘This is business… not love!’…

Hong Kong is fucked up!...