All people in world know 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 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 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.

Recently I had a chance to spend four days in Shanghai. It was a wonderful experience and I was not at all surprised to see that Shanghai is really a city which is developing itself prosperously and positively.

I was staying in a three-star hotel in which you can see as many foreign visitors as you can in a HK hotel. When I had chances to go shopping in one of busiest shopping streets, I found that things sold in HK can also almost all be found there, except that if you were expecting things to be there cheaper, then you would be absolutely disappointed.

All meals I had were served in Shanghainese style - 8 cold appetizers followed my 8 hot dishes. All were very delicious. One would notice that Shanghai people are not meat-eaters in HK. They tend to serve quite a few vegetarian dishes, except that they are able to think of many different styles of frying them in different sauces like cabbage in black bean sauce, stir fry green beans, various mushrooms fried in oyster sauce, etc. Do ask for more chopsticks and spoons if you want to be more hygienic since it seems that they do not have practice as in HK of using a pair of shared chopsticks for everyone.

They seem to like serving dessert in middle of each meal and a soup would come at end. Tea is not served in same way as in HK. Tea would be served but if you want a refill, you will have to ask for it and so this only can make waitress busy enough.