Halloween...HK style

I had no idea how big Halloween was in Hong Kong and am still not quite sure why it's so big here, but it is. Everyone here really really loves this holiday and it's certainly not just for the kids. People here have been talking about events, dressing up, and parties for a couple of months now.

I've never been a big Halloween person before but realized quickly that I'd have to come up with a costume idea. Originally, Scott and I were planning to go as something together, but we're both procrastinators when it comes to Halloween costumes (as anyone who has spent Halloween with us knows). So then he tells me he's already got a costume! His friends went shopping and picked up a Ghost Busters costume for him so he was all set. So I finally went shopping on Friday (the day before Halloween of course) and was left with not many great options - there were the usual suspects: Rainbow Bright, Drag Racer Girl (no idea), Referee, and some type of cat costume. I opted for cat. I really wanted to be a ghost so I could be in the same theme as my Ghost Buster and his buddies, but I wasn't creative enough at that point. So I went as the Ghost Buster's pet cat - if they had one anyway.

So the party started pretty early. We were out and in Central by around 6:30pm. Once we met up with Scott's fellow ghost busters, the paparazzi showed up.

And they were OBSESSED with taking photos with these guys. It was like they were celebrities. It was very strange but really funny at the same time.

Here are some of the other costumes that night....

The jabba wakkies (for all you, America's Best Dance Crew fans)

The crowd in LKF....

The police moving people up the street like cattle. It was literally too packed to stand so they started moving everyone up and past the street. If you weren't at a bar, you weren't sticking around.

Eventually, I found some of my friends walking the street and got them into the bar. Introducing...

The Mario Brothers...

Kitty and her ghost buster....

Cat woman and her man in drag...

Matt, his fiancée Kim, Ben, and Scott and the rest of the ghost buster troops! This was when they played the ghost buster song at the bar.

Wolverine...

 

Lady Gaga...

The best Lady Gaga (in my eyes)...

It was a great night with a lot of fun pictures. I won't post them all here but if you want to see the rest of the pictures, go here: Halloween Pics or find me on Facebook! 

Scott's Birthday in HK

Ever since our crab incident, we have been trying to stay in a bit more. You know, think more economically. When Scott's birthday came around, I thought he might want to splurge and doing something extravagant but being the smart, economical guy that he is, he told me he just wanted to make a nice dinner at home. So we did. We made a beautiful dinner consisting of shrimp cocktail, steaks with a goat cheese/butter compound, garlic mashed potatoes, and spinach. And for dessert, I made him a homemade carrot cake complete with frosting (even though I don't like frosting on carrot cake).

I know what you're thinking, and yes, chopsticks are my cooking utensil of choice.

The finished products. I know, we fancy.

The cake after Scott already had some of course:

I knew this was all Scott wanted but I couldn't help but want to give him a little something so I thought, what does Scott absolutely love? No, I couldn't fly Mark Sanchez out here or Sexy Rexy - they're busy winning football games. The next best thing would have to be boats - a boat trip. So we went on a harbor cruise where you sit in these lounge type couches, enjoy wine and music, and just enjoy the view of Hong Kong. It was a really nice evening and a way to celebrate that's special to Hong Kong.

Views of the city from the boat. These are taken from iphone so sorry if they're not great:

I think I did a good job considering this was the outcome:

Ode to a dumpling

It was my mom's birthday this past weekend and in her honor, I decided to make some of her famous homemade dumplings. And I don't mean to toot my own horn but....toot toot. beep beep cuz they were awesome. :) And despite all the Chinese food available here, there's just nothing like my mom's homemade dumplings which is exactly why it hit the spot. It made me think of her, miss her, and appreciate her amazing cooking. I hope she knows how much I love and miss her and how much she is still part of my life here despite being 15,000 miles away.

Happy Birthday, Mom! Hope you're having a great time!

First comes the prepping of the filling made of pork, ginger, soy sauce, white pepper, salt, scallions, white cabbage, and my mom's secret ingredient. ;)

Then it comes together and looks a little something like this:

Then you wrap them all which takes a while but is also therapeutic so not so bad.

Then you wrap some more because let's face it, you gotta make extras for a rainy day.

And here's the finished masterpiece. These dumplings also make me think of Suse and how often we'd make these at our apt in college except back then I had a little delivery service called Mom who would drop them off to me every other week. Damn, those were the days...

Yum Yum!! Or in Hong Kong, we'd say "Ho Ho Sek!"

Again, Happy Birthday Mom! Hope you enjoyed these, but probably not nearly as much as I did. ;)

$100 Bucks For A Crab?!?!

I had to share about this story because I'm just so upset. I feel like such an idiot for letting this happen yet I know better and have learned a lot since then.

So I went with Scott to see Inception a couple of weekend's ago. It was my second time seeing it, his first. The theatre was in this mega mall complex so we decided to grab dinner before the show. There were a ton of restaurants to choose from and ultimately we decided on this Chinese restaurant that I can't recall the name of now. So the restaurant's specialty were crabs so when we sat down, we checked out the menu and the first 3 pages were of different crab dishes. And we do love seafood so we decided, why not? So the waiter came over to take our order. We order 3 things - the crab, a squid dish, and some noodles. The waiter recommended we get their famous crab dish so we went with his recommendation. Then he had us go to the fish tanks and pick out the crab we'd like. There were really big ones and really small ones so we chose one in between. After our meal arrived, we were really happy with our decision. It was a great meal, but we had to hurry so we could make it in time for our movie. As we were finishing we asked the waiter for the check. When the check came, it was a lot more than I expected but since I was in such a rush, I really didn't think much of it - I just asked for Scott's card and we paid the bill. When he got the bill back to sign the receipt, he looked over at me and said, "Babe, the bill's $930?" Only then did it start to register that that was a LOT of money. At that point, we didn't know what to do. The card was already charged. We were taken for as rubes! We left feeling completely deflated. This was a Chinese meal which is typically always the cheaper option compared to western meals AND we only ordered three dishes. How could the bill possibly be over $100 US dollars?!?!?! And it's not like the crab was massive. It was one crab and couldn't have been more than 2lbs. We were pissed and upset with ourselves (i.e. me) and I felt like a fool. I didn't understand. They were so nice. It was such a simple meal - how could one crab cost almost $100 US dollars? It just didn't make any sense. After that night, we both learned a big lesson and ever since then, we have been much better. We scrutinize every bill we receive. We take the bill from the waiter and take our time with it. And we'll never buy anything at market price again. We'll always ask exactly how much everything is BEFORE we decide to order it. The thing is, there was no price on the menu for the crabs. And it was  a restaurant in a shopping mall - it wasn't exactly the four seasons we're talking about here. AND here, they never leave you the bill on the table to pay when you're ready. You have to ask for the bill and when they bring it to you, they hold it in their hand and tell you how much it is. Since then, I've had to take the bill out of 3 different restaurant waiters hands so that I could hold the bill and look at it. So I guess they took advantage of the naive overly polite Americans who by the way, can't read a lick of Chinese. It sucked, big time.

BUT the one redeeming thing is that since then I've been paying a lot of attention to prices for crabs and in my neighborhood I've started noticing there are some shops selling crabs for around $400 per crab. So that's the only thing that makes me feel a little better and think, ok maybe, just maybe we didn't get completely hosed. Guess we'll never really know unless one of you try this crab restaurant in Tsim Sha Tsui and tell me how much they charged you!

He's here!

He's here! And he brought me gifts!
A beautiful bracelet from Scott's mom. Thanks Mrs. Novak! :)

And a few nice things from Scott for my bday.

Scott's been here a little over a week now and we've done so much! First up: getting to know our kitchen. Since Scott has some free time during the day, he has spent many mornings getting to know the neighborhood and exploring. He's discovered 3 - 4 local grocery stores yet none of them have added up to a Stop & Shop - or Trader Joe's for you TJ fans. So we've been shopping at different grocery stores in our apt neighborhood and in my work neighborhood.

He's made so many meals for me already, but I only have a picture of a couple. First was this soup with noodles.

Kinda looks like ramen huh? hehe don't tell him, but that's exactly how it tasted too!

He also made me a really great breakfast with eggs, homemade hash browns, and toast. It was perfect.

And he made me his mom's famous mac n cheese. Most of you have probably already seen photos of this, but here he is in action.

And here were the results. Yum!

Me enjoying a cup with chopsticks no less!

We've also been to Lan Kwai Fong, Central, Causeway Bay, and Ikea (more times than I'd like to admit to). And I've taken him out to eat a bunch of Chinese food including dim sum, soup dumplings, thai, thai/vietnamese, and traditional chinese food take out - roast pork and wine chicken on rice. We also can't forget about Mexican though. We love it and so the first weekend he was here, we hit up i Caramba and got ourselves some tacos, enchiladas, sangria, and margaritas. It felt like home. We'll definitely be back.

Oh and we also recently tried out a Japanese place near my apt. Oops, sorry, I mean, OUR apartment. I keep doing that and everytime, Scott catches me and says, "who's apt?" or "who's bed" or "who's tupperware?" hahaha. I'll catch on soon I'm sure. So anyways, this Japanese restaurant was sooo good! It was about $25 USD per person for an all you can eat japanese buffet. But it wasn't like a buffet where all the food is out and you grab what's available type deal. No. This was a buffet where everything was made to order. So you literally order all the things you want to eat with the waittress and once you're done, you order more as desired. It also includes all the green tea and/or beer you can consume. For for food and drinks, it was a great deal! And we had so much sashimi and tempura and miso soup and edamame, we couldn't even have dessert. It was funny b/c we had a great waittress and at the end of the evening, we asked for our bill. She was like what? You don't want to order more? And we were like, oh god no, we are stuffed. And she was like what about dessert and again, we told her we couldn't - we had eaten so much already. Then she looked at us and was like, wow you guys at sooo little. We couldn't believe it. Then since our waittress was so great, we really wanted to tip her.  You don't tip in Hong Kong and I told Scott that but he just didn't believe me. There was already a service charge included in the bill (which mind you was 10%) so we thought we could give her just a little bit more, just b/c she was really helpful, attentive, and quick. When I tried to give her the money, she had this look of horror and quickly refused the money and ran away. Scott was baffled. He just couldn't believe her reaction. It was quite funny b/c you would NEVER see something like that in the States.

Octopus anyone?

Sashimi...in rare form!

I also took Scott on his first junking trip this weekend. My cousin Alycia and her friends had planned it and invited us along. Scott absolutely loved it and we had so much fun. All of her friends were super nice and it was a nice relaxing day. We also went banana boating and wake boarding although none of us were able to get up on the wake board. Oh well, there's always next time.

I'll leave you with a few photos of that day.

Enjoying some time out on the water...

Slowly pushing my cousin back towards the boat. She's a little afraid of water, can you tell?

After some banana boating and wake boarding, the guys eventually got a little competitve and starting a little diving competition.  Here they are trying to do a back flip all together off the boat.

They didn't exactly start at the same time, but I give them an A for effort. hehe.

Here's another fun one:

I even caught one on video. This is my first time importing video on this blog so I hope it works!

Here's another quick one:

Scott loves being in the water and on boats. Can you tell?

Oh and I almost forgot, we were at home one night just chatting. I was getting tired but Scott was in rare form - actually  he was the way he always is - Mr. Chatterbox and I was playing around on my iphone so I snapped some photos of him during his long speech or tangent or whatever it was. Don't remember now, but we laughed about the photos the next day when I showed them to him. He had NO idea I was taking them.

But they are just so funny so I had to post them. The many faces of Scott Hagerman.

I could have done this all night...but I got tired.

Btw, shout out to the Celtics! We bought that t-shirt that day in Sogo. Pretty cool huh?

Birthday, Baos, and Beautiful light shows

The rest of Karin's visit was really great. We had one week left in Hong Kong and made the most of it.

Notably, we celebrated my birthday together. As much I really like my new friends in HK, it was nice to have some family around on my birthday. It was a pretty relaxed day but filled with great things including little gifts, good laughs, good drinks and a good time. Overall pretty nice and relaxing day, if you consider going to dinner and getting drinks til 1am on a Monday night relaxed. :) The wives didn't. After that, they started calling my friends "party animals" hehehe.

First stop, my favorite, Mexican. Nothing says happy birthday like a plate of nachos and a cool cocktail, am I right?

happy birthday to me!

The next day Karin surprised me with a birthday cake at work. You can imagine my surprise, but you don't have to since we have so many pictures to share! haha.

yay

birthday wishes

The rest of the week was crammed in with movies, dinner, and hang out time. I took them to get the ever famous egg tarts in Hong Kong before they went home. It's a definite must when you visit the city. And they loved them!

Warm and straight from the oven

We also checked the symphony of lights show that happens every night at 8pm. There's a special place to go in TST (Tsim Sha Tsui) which is on the Kowloon side where you can watch all the lights, there's music, and a short narration during the show. It was really beautiful and since we were going there already, I took them to a famous soup dumpling restaurant called Din Tai Fung. It's got a Michelin star and has been written up in the NY Times. It's really famous and they have one in almost all the major cities except for NY. Here are some pics from the restaurant. I think this was def in the top 3 for places that they tried during their trip.

Lots of veggies and baos

Monica mastered chopsticks

Karin

 

 

 

yessssss!

 

outside the restaurant

Here are a few shots from the symphony of lights show. This doesn't do it any justice b/c it's really pretty in person with the music and narration, etc.

Sweaty silly sisters attempting to blot our faces. hehe

We had a great time together and on our last day, Karin and I did a little sisterly bonding in the  morning. We got our hair done. It was fabulous, but Karin says her perm has since then taken a turn for crazyville. I'll post pics if she sends me any.

Moi - shorter, shaggier, shinier :)

someone got a digital perm - doesn't it look great?!

Then we met up with our cousin Alycia who lives in HK now for dinner. The Szetos were once again reunited.

Szetos! Although one is claiming to be a Hsieh these days.

Karin and Alycia

Me and Karin - last night of drinks before her flight

 And you know I had to squeeze in some more food shots while I can. I'm such a foodie - it's sick!

We all started with the french onion soup

Alycia had lobster benedict

Karin had the lobster risotto

And I had the salmon

All of it was great! And you know we couldn't skip dessert so we shared this!

Creme brulee!