Good morning! 😀
I’ve been very distracted by social media recently. You know the new app, Dayre? It’s like a micro-blogging platform and it’s pretty addictive hehehe. You can download it and follow me (@yinagoh)!
But there are lots of stuff you can’t do on Dayre, though it’s awesome. Such as blogging picture-intensive travelogues!
Today, we’re on to Day 3 of my Hong Kong trip! You can read about Day 1 and Day 2 in Hong Kong by clicking on the respective links 🙂
So on our third day in Hong Kong, Casey and Trish were busy with their personal stuff, thus YZ and I had to plan our own itinerary.
The best part about Hong Kong is that it’s small and easy to navigate, so it isn’t difficult at all to plan a trip there, even for the non-seasoned travellers 🙂 With all the resources available online, you can find out just about anything and get to anywhere!
For breakfast, I made it my mission to pay a visit to Australia Dairy Co, which I’ve heard so many raves about. I kept on seeing picture after picture of this place on Instagram, and was admittedly very curious to find out just why it was so popular?!
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Australia Dairy Co.
G/F, 47-49 Parkes Street, Jordan
佐敦白加士街47-49號地下
Mon to Wed & Fri to Sun: 07:30-23:00
Closed on Thu
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Australia Dairy Co. is relatively easy to find, you exit at Jordan MTR and take a short walk to Parkes Street, we got there in minutes because Jordan is just a stop away from Yau Ma Tei.
It was around 10-11am when we arrived, but there was barely a queue for us, thankfully! 🙂 We got seated at a tiny table (squeezed with two other random strangers) and quickly ordered the ‘breakfast set’ from the hassled staff.
Super tiny and super cramped with both tourists and locals alike.
The food doesn’t take long to be served, I’d estimate it to be around five minutes? Soon, a plate of macaroni soup and scrambled eggs with toast were plunked down unceremoniously in front of us.
Jeng jenggggg! A plate of plain looking macaroni soup, garnished with ham.
Toast with scrambled eggs!
The verdict:
YZ ate a spoonful of macaronic and was like “Huh…? This tastes damn normal to me.”
Bwahahahha. I have to say, the macaroni really tasted very NORMAL. There is no other way to describe it. It is a plate of soup macaroni with ham on top. I was almost expecting it to have some out-of-this-world flavour, but it was very normal.
As for the toast and scrambled eggs, I really liked the eggs! They were fluffy and delicious. But as YZ said, “So we’re here just to eat normal macaroni and scrambled eggs that I can cook myself at home?” That pretty much summed up his feelings lol.
Before you start feeling disappointed already, let me first present the one saving grace of our breakfast trip to Australia Dairy Co:
You have got to order this: the warm steamed milk pudding!
It was as silky as bean curd, with a smooth, creamy sweet flavour and texture that melted in the mouth!
After which we posted pictures on Instagram and Facebook and everyone who commented agreed with us that you visit Australia Dairy Co for their milk pudding and not the macaroni/eggs. That was comforting, at least I know that we’re not alone lol. Apparently people just eat the eggs and macaroni because everything comes cheap in a set. Okay, I get it.
Steamed milk pudding in the process of being made.
You can buy chilled bottles of milk pudding too, to take-away!
I heard that they have another dessert which is the steamed egg pudding (which is yellow) and is good as well! So don’t write off Australia Dairy Co completely 🙂
There were also other recommendations for a place called Yee Shun Dairy Company (I remember seeing a branch at Mong Kok!) for those seeking out traditional Hong Kong desserts too.
Personally, I thought it was a pretty satisfying breakfast, cheap and quite good! And the milk pudding was really worth going down for 🙂
I’ve been training YZ as my OOTD photographer during this trip, and he’s been doing a grand job! Muahahahaha. So awesome! Gotta say that YZ’s photography skills has already improved leaps and bounds! 😀
One of my favourite outfits during the trip! And sporting my new buy from Furla at Citygate Outlet the day earlier 😉
Outfit:
Striped open shoulder top from Bebe, quilted leatherette skirt from TheVelvetDolls, sunnies from ShoPunk, suede booties from Argyle Centre
Really happy to have snagged the top from Bebe during the Bebe event I attended a couple days before the trip! The bag is mad love la. I’ve been using it very often, because it’s so sturdy and fits my laptop and files 😀 Super good buy!
Okay I digress.
Back to our day’s programme: you all must have heard of the elusive Space Outlet, and Horizon Plaza in Hong Kong! Basically, Space Outlet (I think it’s now just known as Prada Outlet) is where you can get Prada and Miumiu at factory prices, and nearby is Horizon Plaza, 28 levels of factory outlet goodness!
This place was recommended to me by Jayne, as well as a few followers on Instagram, so I figured I’d go research and visit! Amongst all the luxury brands, I really do like Prada a lot because they have classic and timeless designs.
I read up from a few different sources, and whilst some websites recommended taking a bus service to where Horizon Plaza/Prada Outlet is located, it looked very complicated and I didn’t want to get lost! In the end, I went with the directions from one website, which advised to take a cab from Central MTR.
I thought that sounded like a very wise option, so we took the MTR to Central, and easily hailed a taxi to bring us down to Prada Outlet!
By the way, I chose to go to Prada Outlet first, because it closes quite early, and I really wanted to take a look. Both Prada Outlet and Horizon Plaza close quite early in the evening, if I’m not wrong, Prada outlet closes at 6PM and Horizon Plaza closes at 7. So, it’s best to get an early start if you’re heading for shopping there!
Taking a taxi there was definitely a good choice, the fare there cost less than like SGD15? You might want to have a map of the location (you can google it!) available on your phone though because the taxi driver wasn’t sure where we wanted to go at first.
On the way to the factory outlet and feeling pretty excited! 😀
You’d spot a pretty big PRADA sign on the building once you reach the area, we got a little confused cos the building was under renovation, but you should be able to get directions easily if you ask around!
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Prada/Miu Miu Outlet
2/F, Marina Square, East Commercial Block,
South Horizons, Aberdeen
(Note: Prada outlet is closed on Mondays!)
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I didn’t dare to snap photos with my camera while I was inside the outlet, but I stayed there for a good one to one and a half hours, browsing through their items because it was so difficult to decide what to get!
The outlet looks like a regular Prada boutique and feels just as posh, so you can shop very comfortably!
There is quite a decent selection of off-season items on sale, especially for Prada. Plenty of choices for wallets from both Prada and Miu Miu too. I was looking to replace my old 4-year-old Prada wallet, so I spent a long time oscillating back and forth between my choices!
They do have more classic long wallet designs for Prada in black and red, but I’ve always preferred to get slightly more unique colour choices, because I find black wallets dull. I finally decided upon a pretty lilac/purple-ish shade in a leather that seemed quite durable 😀
Tadaaaa! This cost me about SGD500 if I remember right! It’s not really very cheap, probably just slightly cheaper than regular European boutique prices. But I like its special colour 😀
Bags can range from $1.5K onwards, and like the wallets, I’d say that they are slightly cheaper than European boutique pricing, but not by a huge amount! 🙂 There are some nice designs, but don’t expect to see the really popular designs like the Saffiano Lux or Miumiu’s bow satchel bag.
On the whole, dtill worthwhile to check out though! Since Europe is a whole 12 hours and a thousand over dollars away hahaha it’s not like we can pop into a Milan boutique any time we want to for most of us.
Left Prada happy with my loot!
Our next stop: Horizon Plaza!
With the help of Maps on my iPhone, I routed our directions and we walked over from Prada/Miu Miu Outlet to Horizon Plaza. Easy peasy enough, and the walk took around 15-20 minutes? Definitely a walkable distance, even though it was a very sunny day!
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Horizon Plaza
2 Lee Wing Street,
Ap Lei Chau, Hong Kong
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You’d reach an industrial-ish looking area, with lots of car showrooms on the ground floor. And this tall building here is Horizon Plaza, 28 levels of factory outlet shops!
The best way to shop at Horizon Plaza is to look for the shop directory online, or grab one of the directory maps from their lobby, before taking the lift up to the highest level and working your way down via the stairs! Then, you can pick which shops you want to check out, in descending order.
There’s too many shops and brands to name at Horizon Plaza, but you can check out brands like YSL (the YSL factory boutique outlet at Horizon Plaza is new, apparently!), Marc Jacobs, Joyce, Lane Crawford (Louboutin, Marni etc), Max Mara (Juicy Couture, Stella McCartney) and there are many small warehouse outlets that carry items from brands like Celine, Burberry, and more.
If you’re looking to do designer shopping on a budget, Horizon Plaza will be a dream come true! Note of course that even designer items on sale are still rather expensive, so I don’t think Horizon Plaza is for the casual deal-grabbing shopper. You really need to be discerning to sniff out the good stuff!
From what I saw, most stuff are at least marked down by 30%-40%, which is a pretty good deal especially if you’re looking at branded leather goods. The designer apparel were still too pricey for me so I didn’t really look at them.
If you’re tired and need to rest your legs and get mid-day refreshments, there’s a little cafe called Sift on Level 22 of Horizon Plaza.
The red velvet cupcake is supposed to be a hot-seller, but I thought it was too dry. The chocolate cake that we had was yummy though!!
Tea break time!
YZ did manage to find some awesome shoes from a shoe outlet shop that carried Rockport, and they were really good quality and cheap, around SGD120 for a pair of men’s oxford loafers.
Anyway, we got tired like halfway through and stopped at like Level 14 or 15 or something like that! Lol. Also because I couldn’t bear to spend any more money already. But I ALMOST bought a bag at YSL… Decided to control myself in the end. Don’t need so many branded bags, yah.
After we were done shopping, we took a cab back from Horizon Plaza (there’s a taxi stand right outside the lobby, but it’s advisable not to go off too late because the traffic can get very congested in the city area during peak hours!) and the taxi driver dropped us somewhere near Causeway Bay.
We quickly looked around for somewhere to have a random dinner because we didn’t have a proper lunch save for the cake we had in the afternoon!
Walked into a random road-side eatery, after asking if they has fish dumplings. (Developed some mad cravings for fish dumplings after having the awesome ones at Hung Lee the day before..)
The usual lah, just wanton soup, fish dumplings and veggies! I didn’t like the kang kong though. It came in a bean sauce that wasn’t nice to me.
Headed back to Yau Ma Tei via MTR again to our hotel room so that we could dump our purchases in our room and go out for a walk!
I asked YZ to take a close-up of my skirt and bag, heh. The quilted leather skirt is upcoming on TheVelvetDolls next week! 🙂 It’s super chic, and I love it!
Our earlier dinner didn’t fill us up, so we roamed the streets like hungry ghosts looking for more food! YZ loves street food. We’d been seeing a lot of these grilled skewers, and decided to give them a try 😀
You can pick from an assortment of meats, veggies and stuff that’s been skewered!
Some of our picks, bacon wrapped enoki, sausages and octopus!
The skewers are seasoned and grilled with some spicy MSG powder, so it was super hot! They were really tasty when eaten piping hot off the grill though!
I really loved the enoki wrapped in bacon! Noms.
YZ loved it! I also love lah.
All these fattening street food taste the best some times. Cheap, too! It was damn salty though. And a lot of MSG! I had to drink a ton of water to flush out the taste of salt and MSG from my tastebuds.
We came across a restaurant selling… Snake Soup O.O
And they had live snakes outside……..
Sorry, I think the idea of eating snake is quite gross. Obviously I can’t do Fear Factor hahaha.
The streets were full of people as usual, also because it was the night before Halloween I think! There was a damn good beat-boxer busking along one of the streets. He attracted quite a crowd! Damn happening.
You know, I feel like all I’ve been blogging about in Hong Kong is.. SHOP, WALK and EAT.
But honestly that’s what you do when you go to Hong Kong. So we walked and walked and saw a 许留山 around the corner.
许留山 is all over the place in Hong Kong, and is popular for their desserts. They used to have a branch in Singapore, but it closed down!
I remembered it was REALLY good, like 10 years ago when I tried it in Singapore. But since then, it’s become more commercialised and less authentic already! 🙁 I think not really worth trying. But a lot of people rave about 许留山 too. So maybe I didn’t order the right items?
Sesame paste with coconut ice cream!
Mango Pomelo thingy.. with a very meagre amount of mango in it. So sad! ;__;
Didn’t really hit the spot for me, I felt it was abit meh only. Not worth my calories.
I’d rather have a softer cone from the mobile ice cream van!
Wheeee late night indulgence!
It was only 10pm and we’d run out of activities to do.. Eat also eat already, walk also walk before already. But we didn’t want to return to our hotel room so quickly when it was still so early by Hong Kong standards.
So on a whim, we decided to… Go for a late night foot massage!
I thought it was quite brave of us to agree to follow one of the many suspicious looking characters carrying mobile billboards and hawking for customers on the streets, but we were like, AIYA what the heck, let’s just do it!
This female promoter that we decided to go with ended up to be the lady boss of her own massage parlour, and she brought us up to her unit in a dodgy looking building a couple of streets away O.O
End result: it was damn shiok!
The foot massage was soothing though not as firm as I’m used to at our regular foot reflexology place in Singapore, but we decided to also get body massages done and it was reaaaally goooooood! I felt like all my aching muscles were being rubbed and kneaded into blissful oblivion. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Price-wise, it was reasonable too, we probably paid about SGD50 each or so for almost two hours of foot/body massage!
We were totally shiok-ed out and ended the session at 1am, sleepily strolling back to our hotel. Concussed on the comfy hotel bed and had a really good sleep that night.
That ended day 3 for us, so I’d be blogging one last entry on day 4 + 5! Whoopee. Pretty efficient I must say! 😀
Toodles, and hope you enjoyed the read!
xoxo
Read Hong Kong: Mongkok
Read Hong Kong: Citygate Shopping
Read Hong Kong: Stanley Market and Kau Kee Beef Noodles