(Please read Part one: Drink morning tea in a Chinese restaurant of Hong Kong) It is 12:00 a.m. Are you a little hungry again? Lunch may be expensive or frugal, as you like. We may go to a tea restaurant, or a Chinese restaurant. The tea restaurant has become a signboard of Hong Kong. It can provide you with a lunch of the Chinese or Western style with Hong Kong characteristics. All dishes have genuine local flavor, absolutely true to the original. The tea restaurant serves at high speed, provides a variety of combinations and quotes prices which are by no means high when quantity and quality are taken into consideration. The brand-name dishes of different countries can be combined with each other---from whipped egg to steamed buns and from Yunnan rice flour to Italian macaroni.
You may also order a bowl of wontons filled with fresh shrimps. Every wonton may be as large as a baby¡¯s fist, and the filling may entirely be large intact fresh shrimps. The white or slightly yellow wontons with a rosy hue penetrating from inside will make your mouth water. I believe that this episode will reappear in your memory when you look back at this trip to Hong Kong someday in the future.
There is no need to eat too much in the restaurant at lunch. Because I want to have the pleasure of ushering you to a six-star restaurant, which is called ¡°The Peniinsula¡±, it is not just a Chinese restaurant. Maybe on your way there you will come across a booth or a stall, where edibles can be bought. We used to think that a street vendor¡¯s stall is not satisfactory in respect of hygiene. But standing in front of a stall of this open type in Hong Kong, you will discover that the attendants¡¯ operations are highly normalized. That they pay attention to hygiene is certainly beyond any doubt. The mobile vendors of cooked food, who travel about with their pushcarts carrying simple equipment, prepare in public the delicious edibles which are often not available even in high-class Chinese restaurants and make demonstrations of their cooking skills to the consumers half on purpose in order to show off and half in the hope that their business will thereby prosper. As the fragrance of the edibles disseminate in the street, few Hong Kong people can resist the temptation. You might as well buy a bunch of the fragrant curried fish balls to see if they are worth a try. The fish balls are full of elasticity. They are very fresh.
¡°The Peninsula¡± is a restaurant known to the whole world. You must make it a point to drink the afternoon tea of the Peninsula even if you don¡¯t put up here. The afternoon tea is of authentic English style and is accompanied by a melodious musical performance. When you repose yourself at this place you are sure to find it permeated by English culture and customs. Let¡¯s each have a glass of rose-leaf black tea. It is concocted by adding rose-leaf syrup to black tea, which pertains to the Russian style of tea drinking. Take a sip of this kind of tea, and you will feel the aroma of the rose-leaf syrup and a sour-sweet taste spread in your mouth. Look at the velvety petals floating on the amber-colored black tea, and you will feel that the tea is so beautiful as to be without a peer. The visual enjoyment alone will be enough to compensate for all that you have paid for it. If you are one of those friends who are fond of drinking alcohol, you may add a little vodka to it. As for the refreshment, we may each order a dish of buttered spongy cake. This has always been the favorite cake in Britain. Don¡¯t forget to butter the cake! Let¡¯s take up the choice tea utensil and enjoy a leisured afternoon in an aristocratic fashion.
Time slipped by as we were chatting. It¡¯s already three o¡¯clock in the afternoon. When the horsemanship contest takes place in Hong Kong, it will be right in the hot August. For the present, why not go back to the restaurant rooms to take a little rest and then deck ourselves up? How about going to Sai Kuang at six in the evening?
Please read ¡°A Tour of Hong Kong---the City of Joy and Brilliant Light¡±, which will follow.
Since its reversion to China Hong Kong has become an Isle of the Blessed and a land on which people of high economic, social and political standing congregate. It is a city which seems only to be encountered in fairy tales. Here you have beautiful sights of Nature to view and admire and also the great variety of pleasure provided by modern commercial civilization to enjoy. Here you can immerse yourself in the material gratifications of modern society and relive the plain and pure style of life of the primordial age.
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