Birthday Celebration - Hong Kong Style
I had no idea how I will be spending my first birthday in Hong Kong. I don’t have any plans; I don’t know what I’ll do for that day. I actually thought no one would know as I am barely new to the company. I was originally thinking of just having lunch with a few friends but not telling them about the occasion.
To make the long story short, my instincts were wrong because they knew it was my day. Joyce arranged for a birthday lunch and there were 12 of us who went for a traditional Yum cha meal at Asiana Restaurant. We were supposed to go to another restaurant but due to heavy rain, we went to Asiana, which is just behind our office building.
Yum cha, in Cantonese, literary means “drink tea”. Basically, people drink tea while eating small portions of meal. For an average Filipino, the serving may not be enough for one meal. There is no rice (at least for the foods I have experienced eating) which is the basic food eaten by Filipinos. There may be a lot of food varieties but the servings are usually small. For instance, a dim sum has only 3 pieces per tray. Of course, you can order 2 or more trays but as I have observed, Chinese people do not get more than 2 trays to allow everyone to taste each kind. The most they would get is around 2 or maybe 3 trays for one kind of food. The rest should be different ranging from stir fried vegetables to an assortment of glutinous desserts.
The food is ordered either at the counter or you can get it to a food servant passing by your table. For each table, there is a card given and every time you order a meal, they will put a stamp on it so they can keep track of your orders. Of course, as the most important part of this meal, everyone sips tea occasionally while eating. It is important that the cups are always full of tea. Every once in a while, my officemates would pour more tea on my cup and everyone else’s within their reach. Once the teapot is out of tea, you need to take its lead off so the food servants would know you need to have a refill.
In contrast to the Philippine tradition that the celebrant would be treating his/her friends, I was the one being treated for this meal. How cool is that?! 
The celebration continued on Friday as 5 of us went for a night out. The celebration was a bit more Western this time – something closer to what I had been used to for celebrating birthdays. We had dinner at Al Dente’s in SOHO which is an Italian Restaurant. We had the usual salad, pasta and pizza. The pizza is superb, I must say. It has a salmon for its topping and although I am not a big fan of thin crust, the one we had was really good. The place was also nice, very cozy although it has low ceilings and narrow passage (very typical in HK as space is always conserved).
After dinner, we hang out at a bar nearby. The place was a bit busy but still okay. It was embarrassing though, as when they serve the menu, they had everything but non-alcoholic beverages. See, I don’t drink so there is nothing I can choose from. It’s a good thing V knew we could order some juice so I had punch.
So there yah go. That’s pretty much everything I had for my day. Nothing really special or fancy but it’s a much better way of celebrating my day than what I had originally thought. Until next year! 
djong here. thanks for stopping by i gotta go! and happy anniversary! enjoy your bangkok trip!
July 8th, 2008 at 12:18 am
today is July 8, 2008 Happy 33rd monthsary majal ko.:o) hihihi!