Hong Kong 5/5

Day 5 was the last day of our trip.  With a midnight flight, we still had a full day.  And here’s how we spent our time:

Breakfast was at McDonald’s.  Go ahead and laugh at my wellness plan, Monica and John, but did you know that the HK McDonald’s made a really tasty soupy macaroni?  And their McCafe was simply incredible… the barista was more professional than any Starbucks or Peet’s employee that I had ever seen, taking his sweet time to craft each drink, creating coffee arts that looked identical to their TV commercials.  Wow!

Not typically a fan of this HK dish, but somehow the McD version was pretty good.

I don’t get it.  Americans invented McDonald’s but why aren’t the American McDonald’s this good?

Then we headed back to Central, hitting the Laduree at the LANDMARK, and picking up some macarons for our macaron-loving friends back home.  When that mission was accomplished, we still had some time to visit Times Square, a commercial district no less crowded than the NYC Times Square.  We went up and down the giant vertical mall that actually carried stuff that normal people could afford.  Found another Laduree and bought some for ourselves (excluding Xuan Xuan, hehe).

The LANDMARK was yet another mall where we could afford absolutely nothing.  Well okay except for those macarons for a certain very special people.

If Hong wasn’t there, I’d walk by this place and be like, “oh neat, check out this candy store… or are they selling fancy soap?”

Times Square.  Those skip-a-level escalators were kind of confusing.

Finally, some (supposedly flown from Paris daily) macarons!

Happy faces after dessert, and a confused face in the back not sure what just happened.

Lunch was back at the hotel, with take-out foods from the TST branch of Lan Fong Yuen.  To pay proper respect to this legendary cafe, when we put their food on newspaper we flipped to the pages with Chanel and LV ads.  The food looked ordinary like any Chinese take-out, but I’m drooling now as I write this, recalling how it felt on my tongue.  It wasn’t even just the drinks that they were famous for, but the rice dishes equally made me wish that I lived on Nathan Road in TST.

Please take note: the real HK milk tea (and yuan yang) uses Lipton tea bags.

This place was pretty close to our hotel, but darn it was hard to find, even when I had the exact street address.  We tried and failed twice, then had to ask someone who was trying to sell Jenny’s Cookies in the street.

On the left: milk tea and stir-fried instant noodles with chicken, on a giant LV watch
On the right: yuan yang and 鴛鴦鬼佬飯, on a giant Chanel watch.  I randomly ordered this dish based on its very funny but politically incorrect name.  Turned out to be one white and one red pasta sauce over rice.  Sounds stupid, but I can eat another one of those right now.  Yup, whenever “now” is as you are reading this, I can eat another one of those.

After nap on this last day, we had no more energy to run around.  Going downstairs to the mall under the hotel (we had yet to find a building in Hong Kong without a mall in it somewhere), we shared one dessert, shared another dessert, and grabbed a quick dinner before heading home.

 
Ahh.  Ahhh.  Ahhhhh!!!!!