The Unlawyer

I remember seeing many Philippine book lovers rejoice over the decision last May by the finance department, after being prodded by the Palace, to suspend the implementation of a tariff on imported books. As a heavy consumer of books myself, I was certainly happy on hearing this news.

It looks like, however, that this particular zombie refuses to be put down and its stinking corpse has risen once more from its moldy grave:

“M[alacañang] will issue an executive order (EO) formally setting the tariff on imported educational books to zero, Finance department officials said.

“The EO, Finance Secretary Margarito B. Teves said last week, will enable the country to comply with the 1950 Florence Agreement wherein signatory countries pledge not to apply duties on educational, scientific and cultural materials.”

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Here is another famous cha chaan teng I have heard about but never got to visit until quite recently: the Tsui Wah Restaurant on Wellington Street, Central, and just across the street from another famous culinary landmark: the Yung Kee roast goose restaurant.

In my earlier entry about another cha chaan teng I didn’t really explain it all that concisely. Daisann McLane did a better job of it than I can:

“The Hong Kong cha chaan teng is a classic, 1950s-60s style coffee shop diner. Think Howard Johnson’s, Horn and Hardart, or the original Denny’s, but with Chinese chefs in the kitchen. The menu is like an anthropological record of Hong Kong’s post-war manufacturing boom. Factory workers had short breaks, and needed to eat cheap, and fast, away from home. They also had a bit of disposable income to spend on the novelty of “Western” foods (that were re-interpreted by clever chefs to please a Cantonese palate).

“Although you certainly can eat breakfast, lunch or dinner at a cha chaan teng, it is really a place where you go to satisfy those itchy, in-between meal food cravings. 11 am and 3 to 5 pm are the classic cha chaan teng hours–when you absolutely must have that pork chop, fried in black pepper sauce, perched atop a little hill of overcooked spaghetti (In Cantonese, jyuh pa yi mihn). When nothing else will do but a slab of airy white bread toast slathered with bricks of butter, garnished with condensed milk. Or a bowl of soup filled with instant noodles and rubbery fish balls.”

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I have heard so much about the Lin Heung Tea House from quite a number of bloggers but I never had the opportunity to visit it, not the least on account of the faulty directions I was once given to this restaurant. As a consequence, my party and I had to take a much longer walk than we had to. We aborted our mission and we ended up taking our meal in another restaurant in Hong Kong’s Central district. I had to shelve the idea of taking dim sum at Lin Heung in the meantime until I had another chance to visit Hong Kong.

So, after consulting the very useful Centamap online map of Hong Kong, I finally divined the easiest method to visit this old-time restaurant and off I went one very humid early Wednesday morning.

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At the southwest corner of Duddell Street in Hong Kong’s Central district, midway up the historic stone steps connecting this road to Ice House Street, is a Starbucks coffee shop. A disinterested passer-by may conclude that this newly-opened, rather out-of-the-way outpost of the Seattle, Wash.-based chain looks exactly like the thousands of its kindred around the world, but no.

Step inside, however, and you will see a Starbucks that is unlike any you have ever seen.

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Like Hong Kong and Singapore, Taiwan has developed its own indigenous culinary culture. One famous example of such is beef noodle soup, which is in itself derived from classical Chinese cuisine. The people of Taipei call their city the “World Capital of Beef Noodles” and take this signature dish so seriously that they actually hold a Taipei International Beef Noodle Soup Festival every year and actually vote for their favorite restaurants online.

I missed an opportunity to try Taiwan beef noodles the last time I was in Taipei the year before, so I grabbed the chance this year and hied off to the most convenient - just meters away from the Zhongxiao Fuxing subway station - restaurant I could find: the “Chuan Wang” Gourmet Stew Beef Noodle shop on Zhongxiao East Road. It was the perfect meal on a cold and rainy Thursday night.

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For the past couple of years, except for an excursion into the land of Sony Ericsson, I have been using nothing but Nokia smartphones, starting from the awkward-to-use Nokia 3650, then the Nokia 6630, through the Nokia E61, the Nokia 6120 Classic and now the Nokia E71.

I may, however, decide to set aside my preference for Nokias and its Symbian O/S and try something new, in this case the HTC Snap, if ever that Taiwan-based company makes this phone available in the Philippines. The Snap was first introduced to the world at CTIA Wireless 2009 last March.

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