Dinner at Hurricane Bay Part 2

Huge prawns covered in chiles.
Family style, complete with lazy susan.
Some sort of lobsterish/shrimpish cross-bread fried and powdered with cayenne pepper.
Fish heads, fish heads, roly-poly fish heads...
Gelatin with floaty bits, served as dessert. As many of you know, I don't favour gelatin-based foods.

Dinner with the HK Ecko office in Hurricane Bay

Some of our HK counterparts
Yes, that is a whole duck head...
I love scallops and these were some of the best I have ever eaten. They were covered with glass noodles and loaded with garlic.
Some sort of chopped up spiny lobster which was then deep fried.
Overall, the food in China was fantastic. Hurricane Bay is located right on the water (obviously) and the waterfront is lined with restaurants serving the finest fish available. We all know seafood is best served fresh and these restaurants all have massive banks of fish tanks in front of them holding a variety of seafood. There were some fish in the tanks that had to weigh 100+ pounds. Unfortunately, I waited until after dinner to shoot pics of them and our meal involved so many courses that by the time we were finished all the tanks had been shuttered.

Ham-A-Lama-Ding-Dong...

This shop sold all manner of exotic (to my eyes) food items. At first I thought these smoked ham hocks were some sort of special dried goose...

Crab Rap, Yo!

These poor crabs were wrapped up and sitting in a bin at a street market. I couldn't confirm whether or not they were definitely alive, but the fact that they were so tightly bound led me to believe that they were. PETA would have a field day...

Hong Kong highrise

A typical view of the exterior of many buildings in Hong Kong. The city is vertically overbuilt with tall, narrow, nondescript structures many of which seem to have cobbled on additions and upgrades. It seems that all of these A/C units, along with their requisite pipes, ducts and cables, were a total afterthought

look at the size of that f***ing cobra!

yum!

sooooo, i know it's supposed to be a pig, but doesn't it look like a roasted rat? it's the maraschino cherry eyes, right?

..and then there was bird nest based desserts...

so apparently they boil down the nests of swallows, which are saturated with the birds saliva, to make a delicious, fruity, gelatinous concoction. my friends didn't explain this to me until after i had eaten about half of the dish. in turn, i tried to explain the obvious "spit or swallow" joke. my chinese friends were either offended and just played ignorant or they just really didn't get it... apparently, it very good for your skin (not even kidding).

hong kong noodle shop

a light lunch of aromatic street food, i was pleased to join andrew and his lady for some savoury noodle soup and steamed vegetables. delicious dishes.

hong kong street food

the large square blocks are literally called "stinky tofu" and they smell like your body odour after 10 days of backcountry camping. surprisingly, the taste is not that bad. however, during consumption i found myself repulsed by the smell to the point where i couldn't finish my block 'o' stinky tofu.
and you thought grade school lunch was fraught with "mystery meat"...
i think this was some sort of fermented or rotten egg that was then breaded and fried. after the stinky tofu i wasn't really in the mood to experiment...
when you are with a local and he can't even figure out the identity of the squiggly items on the right it is a clear signal to stear just as clear.
delicious tripe and other parts cooked in a fatty juice. another one of those dishes that surprises you with it's pungent aroma.

no parking, baby...

seems obvious enough.

grand hyatt hong kong

seemed like a pretty nice place. the "when" makes it seem inevitable, though.

hong kong street shots

"game over" mr. money bags was perfectly appropriate considering the u.s. ecomony was shitting the bed while we were galavanting around china...

copy cat googly eye cru

so the brooklyn-based googly eye cru is ubiquitous enough to have a chinese/hong kong knock off. my friend malia is the queen of the cru and she has definitely dropped some of her stickers during her travels to the orient... to see some pics of the real deal check out the link. googly eye cru

hong kong airport terminal

check the structural elements on the ceiling of the hong kong airport terminal. don't really understand the engineering going on here, but i'm keen on the visuals...

motel 168, as seen from hong kong airport

see how space age? just showing off...

illlicit carry-on items

some items that are apparently banned on flights from mainland china to hong kong. it was always the little things that reminded you of the oppressive government policies...

shanghai airport en route to hong kong

so all over china you can find chicken and duck wings sold pre-cooked and individually vacuum packed for your gastronomic delight. we finally broke down at the airport and bought a package of duck wings. when you break open the seal, there is a strange, yet familiar odour that emanates... then you notice the congealed duck fat encasing the wing... reminds you of crappy vienna sausages... you hesitate... you bite... and you realize that fried scorpions aren't really that bad. i love duck, for god's sake. i wanted to eat and enjoy. instead, the combo of the duck wing and a few chicken flavour pringles (also available in airport gift shop) sent my appetite packing for the night. here you see alison and andrew enjoying their wings. andrew is marvelously oblivious in his ipod distraction.

after hours--shanghai

the indomitable lin lin of jellymon with her equally intriguing friend. this shanghai crew was really fun, very cosmopolitan and definitely up to speed on all fronts. there were aussies, canadians, chinese, japanese, europeans and us americans all hanging out and talking about making and doing the things we will all be reading, blogging, hyping in the coming years. although our stay in shanghai was brief, it was the most comfortable city as far as cultural atmosphere goes. strangely enough, the local art scenes still seemed to be in its infancy relative to beijing.

after hours--shanghai

went to a spot after delish duck dish for drinks and to meet with a group of shanghai graffiti artists. this is a guy named SEAF sharing his black book with us. it's strange that graffiti even happens in china, considering the generally represssive government. however, according to these guys the police don't do anything as long as graffiti is only going up in certain places and neighborhoods. another instance where the government seems to be looking the other way while a creative culture takes hold in the younger generation.

peking duck in shanghai?

seems out of place, but it was as tasty as in peking/beijing. cut in front of us and served in three distinct courses. chinatown ain't got nothin' on this. and the chef looks like a ghost!

thrasher on the streets of shanghai

i came across this scene on the way to and from moca shanghai. some young shaman in a thrashing trance state above his sleeping eldery family member? all i know is that i was in the museum for at least 1.5 hours and i have no reason to believe that he ever wavered. unless, of course, he was just putting on a show for me...

hello pizza shanghai

"hello? pizza?"

moca shanghai

despite what you may think you know about the quality of chinese manufacturing, chinese artists are creating a lot of sculpture out of cast resin and metal with an incredibly high level of production value. granted, material and manufacturing costs are tremendously lower in china, and young chinese artists are taking full advantage. i saw quite a bit of sculpture throughout the galleries and museums in china that was ambitious in scale and finish. i was not always sold on the concepts, and some pieces definitely derived from the work of popular western artists, however i found the initiative and enthusiasm commendable. some pieces of interest, from top to bottom:

1. "the desire of a mosquito" by zhuang kolkoi, resin complete with mosquito sound effect

2. "finger pointed childish ox" by wallace chan, carved from obsidian

3. "divorce self from reality and act blindly" by liang binbin, koons-like cast metal with a hirst-like title

moca shanghai

this piece was pretty cool. as you can see, it is scaled model of all the plumbing fixtures and lines on a given floor of an apartment building. the piece was tall enough that you could walk underneath.

moca shanghai

FIRE CAT!

moca shanghai

after visiting zhang huan, a local friend of andrew wongs from his parsons days took us to moca shanghai (museum of contemporary art for the art nubes--sorry if that sounds snooty).

her name is lin lin and she runs jellymon (www.jellymon.com) with her boyfriend sam jacobs. they have some good stuff and apparently lin lin knows everyone in the world. after my return from china i was at a party and the hostess had a polaroid of her and lin lin sitting together. it was one of those classic "how do you know lin lin?" "how do you know her?" moments... she and sam had designed a nouveau tea room in the cafe area of the museum. adjacent to the tea room was a wall mural that looked half finished. however, it did sport the likeness of andy warhol and terry richardson (?). never got the full story on that one.