Mong Kok is a known shopping haven in Hong Kong.  I’m familiar with this place since we went here on my first visit to Hong Kong in 2010.

This year, our first visit to Mong Kok was on our second night.  A.V. and I decided to do some night shopping after watching the Symphony of Lights.  My friend bought some watches and jade while I had a field day buying craft supplies.

Seeing these was such a pleasant surprise because they sell it cheap!  I forgot the exact amount, but it’s about HKD 30-35 apiece.  In peso, that’s about Php 180, which is such a good buy because the cheapest Martha Stewart craft punchers I have cost me Php600+!

Of course, the quality isn’t as great because unlike my Martha Stewart, EK and Tonic punchers, these only work on thin (about 80 gsm) papers (the branded ones can punch through card stock, even on boards as thick as 230 gsm).

Because we’re taking the midnight flight on our last day, we decided to while our time away by going back to Mong Kok for some food trip.

Hong Kong is a street food-lover’s paradise and this is evident in the scores of sidewalk stalls in the streets that sell anything from the usual tofu, fishballs, vegetables and meat on sticks, etc. to the unusual (at least for some) stuff like octopus legs and squid.

My friend and I first tried the eggette (gai daan jai), which is simply a kind of spherical pancake or ball waffle made from eggs, sugar, flour, and evaporated milk.  It is also called egg puff, egg waffle and bubble waffle.

Interestingly, they now serve it in flavors like chocolate as in 2010, we only tried the plain one.  In the above collage, the darker one is the chocolate-flavored eggette.  I was thinking that maybe they just put some food coloring on it since it did not taste chocolate-y at all.

Later, my friend and I bought some fishballs and meat balls.  Of note was its perfectly round size since ours back home aren’t.  Our fish balls aren’t even spherical but just round and flat.

Cheap and filling, though I still prefer Pinoy street food.

Lastly, we had Hong Kong’s famous milk tea.

It’s surprisingly good.  And they come in many flavors too.  I liked its taste so much that I now put milk on my tea.

Since it was also our last day in Hong Kong and I still had a lot of Hong Kong currency, I decided to buy more craft punchers and luggage tags.  Here’s a photo of my haul from Mong Kok.

The luggage tags came in handy as Christmas presents for colleagues.

As I was doing this post, I did further reading on Mong Kok and found out that it was rated the busiest district in the world by the Guiness World Records.  No wonder, as it’s so crowded (its population density is said to be 10,000 persons per km2).

Note the cartoon-like character and the balloon lady in the collage.  Such interesting characters are common in the area.

To know more about Mong Kok, read HERE.