green legs, pale buns -- and brown sauce

This past weekend was a three-day weekend, due to Lord Buddha's Birthday. Devout Buddhists would spend the day in worship at a monastery or temple. My weekend was a little less structured...

My original plan was to see the world-famous Bun Festival on Sunday afternoon. This is an annual festival held on Cheng Chau Island [look right, see map]. But I had previously agreed to meet up with some people for dim sum that morning. So I figured, "OK, a quick dim sum then I can still make it to the ferry pier in plenty of time." But the dim sum was so fun that one thing led to another. Basically, I ended up with my English classmate (and her Welsh friend) at her flat to watch a Cantonese movie. With two Brits in the room, quite a few of my classmate's suppressed English habits suddenly emerged. She had a sudden desire for a "cuppa" and a "fag". (Translated, these terms are "cup of tea" and "cancer stick", respectively.) Her strangest pre-movie craving was for fried fish balls in "brown sauce". "Brown sauce?", I asked her. "Yeah, as in HP sauce." was her sarcastic reply. At my puzzled look, she continued to explain the wonders of this British sauce. (There's no exact US equivalent, but Heinz 57 or A1 sauce comes close.) Fish balls in brown sauce aren't bad pre-movie snacks, especially when watching a movie where the male lead eats a turtle claw. (Classic quote from that movie: "If you've had turtle claw, you must try the turtle liver...")

After we watched the movie, it was too late to head to Cheung Chau. But my classmate's Welsh friend was, coincidentally, planning on heading to Cheung Chau the next morning. I was invited to join her and two of her friends on their outing. These two friends were Cantonese, and Cheung Chau is much less Westernized than Lamma Island. So this trip was much less Westernized than my Lamma trip of a couple weeks ago. We missed the Bun Festival itself, but there were still some pale buns remaining. We hiked up the hill on the north of the island. We hired a kaido (see boat pictured below) to explore a pirate cave on the south of the island. By the end of the day, we felt tired after all of our walking and exploring. We decided to have dinner at one of the outdoor Chinese seafood restaurants Cheung Chau is known for.



For those of you who aren't familiar with Chinese meals: if there's four people, normally four courses are ordered and shared all around. The two Chinese offered to choose all four dishes for us, and we (the two Westerners) agreed. The two seafood dishes -- quick-boiled shrimp and crab with green onion -- were dishes I've had before. The third dish, Chinese spinach with egg, was slightly strange because some of the eggs used were "thousand year old" eggs. The last dish was the strangest of all: the two ladies had changed their original order of stir-fried lemon chicken to stir-fried lemon frog legs. The frog legs were covered in batter (so in this case they weren't green) and -- to me, at least -- the taste was very similar to chicken. The small bones were definitely not chicken bones: Kermit The Frog's quote of "millions of frogs on tiny crutches"(The Muppet Movie) passed fleetingly through my head. Surprisingly, I don't feel guilty about trying frog legs. I just don't want to hear someone tell me, "If you've eaten Kermit the Frog, you must try Gonzo..."