Taiwanese Shaved Ice Cream

Foreground: Green tea ice cream with green tea syrup and corn flakes, Background: Chocolate ice cream with marshmellows

Pretty much the best dessert of life.  No kidding.

Chinese name 雪花冰, it's basically a mountain of shaved ice that tastes like ice cream, topped with some kind of sauce or crumbly topping and served with fruits or some type of tapioca. I had it during my first week in HK and got ADDICTED.  And then I got my friends hooked. har har har.

There's a chain that serves this type of ice cream called Tong Pak Fu (糖百府).  They have set combos already (ice cream & topping & 2 or more sides) or you can create your own with price going up the more stuff you add.

Some notable flavours/combinations:

1.  Horlicks shaved ice cream base
SO GOOD.  It tastes like Horlicks and how can you not love that.  If you don't know Horlicks, its this malt drink that's really popular in HK; I used to drink it when I was small all the time.  You can get it served topped with Horlicks powder.  AMG.

2.  Hazelnut sauce

Sesame ice cream, hazelnut sauce (in the little cup), mango exploding tapioca and corn flakes

I got a sesame ice cream with hazelnut sauce, and the sauce came separately.  Could not believe how strong the hazelnut flavour is.  SO GOOD.

3.  Exploding tapioca

Chocolate ice cream, exploding tapioca (the white one), regular tapioca and corn flakes

My mind was blown.  There are so many types of tapioca you can get to eat with your ice cream but this was insane.  It's basically tapioca with juice inside enclosed in a thin outer layer, so when you chew it in your mouth the juice explodes.  You can get different flavours like yogurt, mango or passionfruit.  Pretty much my must get when I go to this ice cream place.  The bomb.

Green tea ice cream topped with sesame, passionfruit(?) exploding tapioca, glutinous rice balls

The flavours I've tried so far are:  Green tea, horlicks, guava, sesame, chocolate.  ALL GOOD, actually I haven't heard one person say that there's was "okay" so I think all the flavours are good :P

I'm sorry for making many of you cry after reading this post.  Solution:  come to HK :)

Thailand Trip

Just came back from Thailand a few days ago (for reading week) and absolutely loved it!  It was pretty hot and sticky but the beach was super nice (finally experienced a tropical beach), food was good and cheap and shopping was super cheap!  I'm having trouble shopping in HK now, things seem so expensive here.  What am I gonna do when I go home?

I took sooo many pictures, you can see all of them in my Picasa albums here.  Here's some of the highlights of my trip:

Parasailing

Once I heard that there would be "water activities" in Thailand I immediately was hoping that there was parasailing.  Luckily for me there was, and for super cheap ($10 CAD for one round, about 2 mins).  I really really loved it, although after a while staying up in the air got kinda boring... I really regretted not bringing my camera after I got down :(  Check out the video of my "liftoff":

From 10.02.27 - Thailand Day 2

Banana boat

I absolutely LOVED the banana boat ride.  At first I was hesitant and didn't want to do it because you just sit on a banana shaped flotation device, it seemed kinda boring.   A bunch of my friends wanted to do it though so I decided to try it too, it was cheap after all ($10 CAD).  I'm so glad I went because it was so so fun!  A bunch of people (max 5) sit on the "banana boat" and you get dragged by a really fast jetski.  It's so fun just bouncing up and down over the waves and the water was sooo beautiful.  After a while the jetski will make a sudden 90 degree turn which makes the banana boat flip over and flings everyone off.  Luckily we saw that happen to the previous group so we were somewhat prepared; we even tried yelling "NO FLIP!!" to the driver but he probably didn't hear or understand English :P Oh well, after the first fall the second one was more fun =)

No pictures of us on the banana boat :( I have one or two pics on my waterproof disposable, still have to develop the pics!

Elephant ride

Elephant ride was really cool, especially because you can feel the elephant's bones in its neck moving as it walked since your feet are right there.  The scary/nervous part was when the "driver" got off to take pictures of us but told the elephant to keep walking.  Ahh!

Ferry ride with the locals

On the last day of the tour we decided to break off from the tour to explore Bangkok on our own, since we haven't really seen the sights of Thailand (it was mostly an activities & shopping tour).  From our hotel we took a ferry to "downtown" Bangkok to see the Grand Palace (where the Thai King lives).  The ferry was very confusing, there's one dock and ferries from both directions dock there.  However they don't really dock.  There's one guy standing on the edge of the boat holding the boat to the dock with a rope and you just climb in.  Then once the ferry starts moving again the guy on the edge comes around and makes you pay.  Only 16 baht, or about $0.50 CAD.


Here's my mini video-log taken on the ferry:

From 10.03.01 - Thailand Day 4

Grand Palace

The Grand Palace was insane.  Every building was built with so much detail, it was AMAZING.  Also the temple of the emerald buddha was covered, and I mean COVERED with gems and jewels.


Eating

Food is sooo cheap in Thailand.  One of the days we got a $200 baht voucher for a food court and the "food court" is actually really nice!  There were tons of cuisines to choose from and each dish was about $40.  We ate soo much that night, way more than we can finish.  Felt bad but I really wanted to try all this different stuff! For $200 I got pad thai, omlette rice, beef ball skewer, Thai shaved ice dessert, thai iced milk tea and fresh fruit shake.  RIDICULOUS.

My favourite meal though was Pad Thai that we had on the street in a market.  I love love love Pad Thai and I felt that eating from the street vendors was as authentic as I could get, and it was SO GOOD!  They put an egg on top and had the noodles under.  Portion was quite small but it was sooo flavourful (but not overwhelming) and delicious.  Loved it!

Also, I am extremely addicted to Thai iced milk tea.  It's basically iced milk tea but alot sweeter (I think with condensed milk).  I'm so sad there isn't any here.  Apparently my friends from the States say they have it there.... why Canada why???

Oh, and every item in 7-11 was so cheap.  Pocky was about $0.50 CAD, popcicles/ice cream bars (ie. drumsticks) were from $0.50-0.75 CAD each.  I ate on average 2 a day (one day I had 3) ._.

We also tried this "deep fried roti with condensed milk, egg, bananas and chocolate sauce".  OMG. Can't even describe.  It was like a crunch pastry with a banana wrapped inside, and drizzled with condensed milk and chocolate sauce.  About $1.25 CAD. SO good.

MISTER DONUT.  Apparently it's a Japanese donut chain.  So so good, these ball-y donuts I think are made of some kinda mochi ingredient so when you eat it it's bouncy and chewy. SOO GOOD!

Shopping

Shopping was super cheap, way cheaper than Hong Kong but surprisingly better quality.  We spent a few hours at the night market which was HUGE, we couldn't even get through half of it.  Everything was really cheap, but it felt expensive because the Thai baht is 30:1 Canadian dollar.  Souvenirs and candy was cheap, I bought lots of mango and durian candy :P

 Don't forget there are more pics on my Picasa photo albums!

CNY in HK

Quite a late post since Chinese New Year was almost a month ago! For Chinese New Year I got a week off of school (Feb 15 - 19) which I used to hang out with my family and go out and explore Hong Kong.  Chinese New Year was unsurprisngly quite festive in HK with lots of events such as New Year flower/night market, float parade and fireworks.  Luckily I got to do all of that! 

The night market was super fun, so fun that I went twice.  I already have a post on it here.  The parade was also pretty cool, there were tons of performances and really big floats, some with huge screens playing random videos promoting the company that the float is sponsored by :P  Tons of people watching though, especially in the main "performance areas" where the floats stop and the performers do their thing there.  In the other areas of the parade route they just walk through, smile and wave.

I had high expectations for the Chinese New Year fireworks and I wasn't disappointed!  I've always heard that HK fireworks were insane and it was so worth standing in the rain for 1.5 hours for it.  There were fireworks of gold nuggets, Chinese characters, happy faces, and different types of flowers.  23 minutes of awesomeness!  Took some pics without a tripod on my DSLR, used myself and my friend as a bi-pod, pretty good I'd have to say :)  Check out all my fireworks pictures on Picasa here.

Had a bunch of large meals with my family which was delicious :) Definitely had alot of yummy meals that week, and don't forget those red pockets!  All in all had a eventful yet restful week off, we should get Chinese New Year off in Canada!

Food Roundup (Week 7)

A mediocre week of food... lol


1.  Yoshinoya Delivery

So far Yoshinoya has the worst delivery system that I've experienced.  The delivery number isn't on their website, there's no option for English (press 2) when I dial in like the other places, they told me they needed 75 mins for my food to come - crazy!  The food was also meh, but the way they packaged it was so cool!

I got the regular beef bowl set which came with soup, upgrade to soft drink for $2.  The food is packaged in two compartments, the beef at the top and rice at the bottom.  Took a while to figure out how to split them but you just put your thumb in the groove in the corner and pull it out.  Pretty clever... lol


Click here for list of fast food delivery places in HK


2.  Crepes at Marion Crepes (Causeway Bay)

From the sign I'm assuming this chain originated from Japan, and I'm pretty sure I saw this chain 5 years ago when I went to Japan :P  All I remember is seeing it everywhere and not trying it, so sad!  Finally get to try it 5 years later... hehe.  I had the vanilla ice cream crepe with chocolate sauce and banana. After ordering in broken Chinese we watched them make it...

OMG, it was so so good when the crepe was still hot~! So delicious...

I finally saw my beloved sesame ice cream there so I'm hoping to go there again to try it out!  There are a couple stores in Hong Kong, find them on their site here.

Lunar New Year Fair at Victoria Park

Tons of people everywhere!

Went to check out the Lunar New Year Fair with some friends last night!  I thought it would just be a small flower market but it was this huge night market with tons of stalls selling all kinds of stuff, with a section for flowers and some sections for food.  It's kinda like Pacific Mall on steroids, LOL.  There were tons of tiger related products since it's the year of the tiger - soo cute :)

If you've been to the night market in Toronto, it's kinda like that, but 10x larger.  Probably the funniest thing I saw that night was "fake" stuff:

"McDoduck" boxes with Mcnugget pillow inside

 

Tons and tons of flowers on sale too. Some pots went up to $2000+ HKD... I believe flowers in the home are supposed to bring luck, and different flowers represent different things (prosperity, long life, romance, etc).

 

Of course we also ate alot of food!  I love street food, SO GOOD.  We tried a few things - this skewer of some red seedy fruit coated in a caramelized/"frozen" sugary syrup.  We originally wanted strawberry, oops :P

Next up we have fried coke.  According to the sign it was "American style" fried coke. Hmmm. :P  It tasted weird, the middle was like, warm sticky syrupy coke, surrounded by thick batter and topped with what tasted like crushed coke candy.  I give it a rating of "meh".

Lastly we had some cheong fun which I talked about in a previous post.  LOVE IT!

We left around 11pm and there were even MORE people streaming in than when we got there!  It's so true how midnight in Hong Kong is the same as the afternoon... just as bright and just as many people!