Rows of waxed whole ducks.
Waxed sausages, probably most familiar to Singaporean Chinese
Chinese ham, crucial to the success of any double-boiled soup! (yum yum)Ok, so I talked about flying all the way to Guangzhou for a stand-up comedy performance by Dayo Wong earlier on in my post and WE REALLY DID IT! The show was great and we sat near enough to the stage at the cavernous Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall that we could see Dayo quite clearly. In China, everything is big, especially memorial halls commemorating Great Leaders. The Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall, which also doubles up as a major performance venue, is so big that it was quite impossible to find a photographic angle to demostrate the size. L size is not limited to just concert halls in China. As it was the winter solstice period, there was a fair number of shops selling "lap mei" （腊味）or waxed food products. Everything from goose intestines to pig trotters could be waxed, preserved and of course eaten and shops strove to display their wares prominently, complete with spotlights shining on the glistening waxed meats. Being Chinese and Cantonese and having ancestors coming from Guangzhou, we had to check out the Cantonese restaurants. We went to 2 of the most famous (and so-called high end) Cantonese restaurants - Lianxiang Lou and Guangzhou Restaurant, both of which were housed in standalone buildings filling at least 3 floors each. Food was really so-so and I must say the Hong Kongers have taken the Cantonese cuisine several, make that many, notches above their Mainland cousins. Frankly, I don't remember much about the food, only that these restaurants resemble chimney stacks spewing tobacco smoke - unlike its more cosmopolitan siblings Shanghai and Beijing, smoking is allowed EVERYWHERE here. We walked out of Tao Tao Ju, another one of those restaurants highly popular with the locals, because it was so smoky that we were gagging. In fact, the entire city was smoggy (visibility no more than 5km) due to the factories and heavy traffic. Even thinking of the rather savoury roast pigeon at Guangzhou Restaurant now brings up wafts of stale nicotine in my head. It is much better to eat off the streets, although that too brings up stinky memories: this time, it's the gutter smell. But at least the food is cheaper and tastier, and you don't pay for callous service or the lack of it. We could actually smile at our food.
荔湾艇仔粥 (Traditional Liwan porridge - we stayed in the Liwan area.)
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