Though it is a standard Kowloon Tour, we started with a fresh Chinese tea to open dialogue in a fine-setting tea house, where I recommend clients to try the dim sum later as it never mixes with lard on making dim sum that some Chinese restaurant could not avoid.
After an hour in warming up and getting know of each other, sharing where they had visited (it has happened before, but it was manageable), three of us were so excited to get started. Clients loved the flowers, fruit and local favour, though she was vegetarian and a Jewish who had to follow kosher.
The stop at redwhiteblue 330 charity shop was fantastic, though not many of them would share our cultural icons, it was my motive to tell foreigners our charity worked hard to sustain their income, and not solely relying on donation. My client spent nearly US$120 for the files, hand-made tic tac toe in cloth, Chocolate Rain dolls, blessing cloth,luggage tags etc. I felt so good and as it was really helping those psychiatric people, and not only a kind of donation to the charity, and not a mere guiding job for me.
Though I have planned to eat at either one of the pure and guaranteed Chinese or western restaurant, the client initiated to try our local flavour and we asked the manager and the staff around one by one in the food court. As I expected, our Cantonese noodles used lard oil during the making process, while the icon with a green leaf still mixed with lard in marinating the ingredients into the dumplings in the general Chinese cooking method. Luckily, we were assured by the one of the managers among those restaurants on the dishes using the soy bean oil and he told us he would check all the items we ordered and make sure the chef would not not to put lard on as the last part of cooking.
We then went through a wholesale fruit market where we found the super sweet dragon eyes (US$3/pound) and giant Fuji apples (US$3 each). Followed by the visit in the wet market, clients were so surprised to see the live chicken kept in the cage, while there were also cleaned black chicken displayed inside the shelve. It might be a little bit weird but not scary, and that might still be the living scenes surviving in some of the local wet markets.
We ended with a stop in the department store where there were five to six consignments on Chinese tea and they bought some flower blossom tea for their girls. A six hour tour, though following the framework again, still offered me the insights in digging something more each time other than simple google hard fact information. This tour, will also encourage me to study more on the history of the Communist Party of the mainland China and its influence to this little city, as I might be quite emphasizing on the colonial part. Time to go to…..bookstore.
