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Mike · Site Admin Joined: 07 Sep 2004 Posts: 4512 Location:

All people in the world know the importance of eating breakfast and every country has their traditional breakfast for its people. English people have their fried eggs, beans, bacon and mushrooms. Pakistan people have their chapattis. Chinese people have their noodles or congee.

If someone happens to come to visit Hong Kong, one can have any types of breakfast one desires.

Because of Hong Kong's inborn nature, one can find typical congee shops everywhere in Hong Kong. Congee comes with different ingredients. You can have congee with minced pork, with pig's stomach and intestines, with thousand year old egg and salted pork meat, with octopus and minced beef and pig's skin (people call it boat's congee because it was used to be available only on boats), and many others. It is one's choice to have a bowl of congee with a pair of deep fried breads stuck together, or deep fried bread wrapped with rice noodles. If you don't like to have anything deep fried for breakfast, you can have congee with fried noodles only. This style of breakfast may seem common among us but may be difficult to be accepted by someone who comes from the west.

My husband is one of those who finds it difficult to understand why people can have something so hot for breakfast in a place with the temperature over 30 degree centigrade.

Of course if you don't fancy anything so traditionallly Chinese, one can also find bread and butter in Hong Kong for breakfast.

To me, the best option is to have breakfast in one of those fast food style Chinese tea restaurants. These places don't only offer tea. In fact, people can enjoy all types of meals from early in the morning till late in the night. Usually in these places, people can have many combinations of breakfasts as you want. My most favourite would be the combination of bread and butter, ham in omelette, a bowl of soup noodles topped with Chinese salted vegetables and pork cubes, and finally completed with a cup of either tea or coffee. This set of breakfast would cost about HK$20. Then one can go to work feeling full with food of both the western and Chinese styles.

As you might have known, efficiency and convenience are what Hong Kong people value. Very often we don't have the time to enjoy a full meal like that. In this case, we would forage inside the refrigerator and see what we can find there in the morning. Fried rice left over from the night before dinner may be one good choice for breakfast. Or anything you think which may be too heavy to start the morning with can be acceptable to us Hong Kong people. I still remember that one morning last month after the Mid-autumn festival when every family was flooded with boxes of mooncakes, a colleague of mine told me that she had eaten a whole big mooncake for breakfast just because she had too many of them at home. I am sure for those who know how fattening and sugary a mooncake is can imagine what tolerance one must have if he can swallow a mooncake in one go.

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