#48 Healthy Living Hong Kong Style

September 24, 2006
I stole the title of this post from the name of the Semester At Sea field trip we joined to begin our 4th and final day in Hong Kong. Here’s a simplified itinerary for our day:

Exercise
Gawk
Gawk
Gawk
Gawk
Eat
Eat

…here’s more detail:
Qin Gong – for 30 minutes we “cleansed our bodies” through breathing and movement
Flower market - the most visually appealing of the specialty markets scattered around the city
Bird market – the locals congregate here with fabric-draped decorated cages to buy, sell, and trade song-birds and the materials one needs to support the hobby. Vendors sell live grasshoppers and crickets by the bag.
Traditional Chinese Medicine – At the Chinese medicine shop the practitioner touches 3 spots on your wrist to sense qualities of your pulse and vital systems. From this a prescription is written mixing quantities of dried flora and fauna from the vendor’s supply. Pistachios improve the mind. Seahorses are Chinese Viagra.

Fresh market – traditionally Hong Kong housewives visit such markets twice a day to buy the freshest meat and vegetables. In the “wet” fresh market the vendors leave the beating hearts in the bodies of the recently killed fish to prove the meat is fresh.
Bird’s nest soup – after we ate this delicacy at a specialty restaurant we were told the main ingredient is swallow saliva extracted from the bird’s crusty nest
Chinese food – deep fried skin of the suckling pig with a side order of jellyfish…yum!

After this assault on our senses, we made our way back to the ship and sailed south from Hong Kong harbor where in two days we’ll reach Vietnam.

Yours in appreciating exotically healthy Hong Kong,
Kelly