Snack “cures”

Having quit from a textile mill in her hometown, Guangdong, where she spent more than 20 years as a line-manager, Zhu Aihua, at her

Icecreams are sold in the snack store

49, changed into a shop assistant in a snack shop in Hong Kong to reunite with her family.

“I’d prefer the muffins packed in dozen. It offers a fair price and my son is so fund of it !” Zhu pointed at the fancy boxes piling up in front of the counter and introduced me warmly in standard mandarin. While leaning on the counter, she wore a sunny smile and looked into my eyes in a way that finally made me take it.

Six days in a week, at 3 pm, Zhu walks from her home two blocks away to the snack shop to relieve the shop owner for the next seven hours. The daily routine: mopping the floor, arranging the shelves and also acting as a cashier, for Zhu, earns her a much easier life than her first year in Hong Kong working as a waitress in a tea dining room, which allowed no time for her to take care of her ill mother-in-law.

“Though it all settled now, it was a huge shift for me in the beginning,” Zhu grinned with a sign, “I did plan for moving to Hong Kong for quite a long time, but with my Popo’s (mother-in-law in Chinese) sudden illness, it still turned out to be a bump.”

Working in the center of “snack mountain”, Zhu gradually picked up herself from the culture shock. Even if she doesn’t taste many of the snacks, she enjoys memorizing most of their names, sometimes making recommendations for customers and sometimes buying her son his favorite. As Zhu said, the job gave her not allowance, rather the happiness to be with her family.

“Curry City”: short cut from Hong Kong to Thailand

“Curry City”: short cut from Hong Kong to Thailand

Just in the center of Hong Kong, Kowloon City, where the old taste of Chinese culture lingers, the Thai curry with its spicy ingredient wins over the food agenda of the Chinese. For spicy food lovers, whenever you decide to regain the pleasure of eating heartily in Hong Kong and taste the authentic Thai curry, Kowloon City is the right place to go.

Standing in Kowloon city, in between Nam Kok Road and Nga Tsin Long road, the smell of Thai curry will greet you from every corner. And the types of curry range from Bangkok style green curry to Chiang Mai northern style red curry with plenty of lemongrass and roselle leaves. The curry in Kowloon, could satisfy the appetites of both the Thai food novice, who has never dived into the curry world or Thai food addict who boasting of being in Thai cooking school for numerous times.

The Thai restaurants, though centered all in Kowloon City and mostly enjoy a high food authentic, differ largely from one another in the overall dining environment. You could expect some restaurants offer you silver bows and cups washed as clean as at home, while others only treat you with the china cookery seemingly older than the cook. However, it could be an adventure for you to pick out your own choice since most of them sharing similar names, such as best selection of Thai food or the Best of Northern Thai food.  It is a tough job to tell the differences among the names with an empty eager stomach.

Apart from the curries, the restaurants there also provide other popular Thai food such as Tom Yom soup and Pad Thai, which could also serve as good alternatives for trying Thai food, while most of them could just arouse you of the sweetness of Thai food as well.  Once, you got tired of eating Siu Mei every day, why not just give yourself a break in the Kowloon City, enjoying the curry.

Old Kowloon,new home