Weekend Cooking: What We Ate on Holiday - Scotland/Hong Kong

Normally, this would be the day that we talked about What I Baked in my Kitchen but we've been away for a month so not a lot of baking going on. We have bought some kitchen related items on our travels but I will share those next month.

Mostly this post is going to be about Hong Kong, but we did have one last day in Glasgow. We decided to spend our day visiting a couple of museums. First we went to the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery. It's an amazing building which is filled with all kinds of things, and you never really know what you are going to see around the next corner. For example, in one of the main halls there is a Spitfire plane hanging directly above an elephants. We were lucky enough to be visiting there was a pipe organ recital happening, which was a lovely accompaniment to wander around the buildings to.

We were also fortunate that this day was one of the few sunny days that Glasgow has had this summer, and so we were able to sit outside in the nearby gardens. We had an Empire Biscuit which is two shortbread biscuits, sandwiched together with jam and then covered in icing! It's a pretty typical Scottish bakery treat and it was delicious.

From there we headed to the River Museum where we had a very short time to wander around. If we had of known what it was like we would have spent more time as it was great. It is basically a transport museum, but the way it is set out is fabulous!

While we were at Kelvingrove we saw some information about famous designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and our next stop was for afternoon tea at Mackintosh at The Willow Tea Rooms. This tea room, located at the site of an original tea rooms in the city, has been renovated using Mackintosh designs. We had afternoon tea here, which I will talk more about at another time, but the treats looked amazing..

The next day we had to be at the airport so we had a leisurely morning, tried burned cream at the airport, which is basically a British version of creme brulee and then made our way to Hong Kong.

The first thing that hit us as soon as we left the airport in Hong Kong was the heat and humidity. We love visiting new places like Hong Kong and Singapore before it, but we are not built for such humid conditions. However, while we might complain about it, we still get out and see and do what we can. Our first stop after checking into the hotel was to go down to the harbor. We were originally planning to just watch the Symphony of Lights, which is the daily light show featuring all the buildings on both sides of the harbour. 

The next day we went took the Green and White Ferry across from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island and then up to Victoria Peak via the Peak tram (amazing), walked through Hong Kong Park, went and saw the worlds longest travelator (my husband was underwhelmed by this part of the day) and otherwise generally wandered around Hong Kong Island. 

After a swim at the hotel, we headed out to the Temple Street markets where we ate at one of the restaurants. 

This was the night that we discovered the Japanese bakery in the shopping centre across the road. We may have visited this place a couple of times. This cake was a Peach cake and it was oh so good. I did find myself having quite a few peach treats while we were in HK. 

One of the things that we knew we wanted to do was to do a day trip to Macau, so we took the bus from Hong Kong and then hired a driver to take us to the main sites. The original plan was to do the hop on hop off bus, but I am glad that we didn't. He took us to places we didn't even know about. Apparently, very few Western tourists make the trip to Macau these days.

Macau has a lot of Portuguese history and so looks and feels quite different to Honk Kong, despite the fact that they are quite close to each other. There are parts of the old town where the buildings are very colourful. We visited Senado Square, the ruins of St Paul and the nearby fortress which houses the Macao Museum and a great view from the top. Fortunately there are escalators all the way to the top. We also visited the A-Ma Temple.

We finished the day in Cotai, home of many amazing casinos. We are not gamblers, so that didn't interest us but the buildings did. We visited The Venetian and The Parisian casinos, and the insides of the buildings were amazing! We also did not miss the chance to try some Portuguese tarts. We then caught the jet boat back to Hong Kong.

On our final day we knew we had to be at the airport by about 5pm, so we had planned some activities that would have meant that we would have had a full day, but it was then announced that there was a Typhoon warning at level 3, so I was quite cautious as I didn't really want to get stuck out in a typhoon. We therefore had a bit of a sleep in, a late breakfast and then wandered across to the shopping centre across the road for a wander around.

We couldn't not take the opportunity to share some dumplings. We have a favourite restaurant here, where they do amazing Xiao Long Bao dumplings. These dumplings have a pork based filling but they are also filled with soup, so you when you take a bit you get both the soup and meat in one go. These were plain pork and soup and they were good. I also had a pineapple and mango juice which was so good. 

After one last visit to the Japanese bakery for cream puffs filled with cream and custard, it was off to the airport. We got there pretty early as I didn't want too risk getting caught out in any weather, so we had time to go and get a foot reflexology treatment which I thought might help with my feet swelling on the flight.  I am still deciding if it was good or not. I mean, I think my feet swelled up less than normal, but oh my goodness that treatment was painful. We also had time for one last holiday drink at the amazing Sky Bar at the airport, which I needed after that treatment.

While we were at the airport, they changed the typhoon warning level to an 8 but luckily, we took off before the worst of it hit so we weren't impacted too badly.

So, that's our big holiday for this year done. We covered a lot of ground, ate a lot of great food and have some great memories to look back on.

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