hong kong

just come back from hong kong, crazy east meets west place. hongkongese do not seem to be very big on chilli variety though. language problems were really hard to overcome so establishing the true identity of the chillies collected was next to impossible. the first two varieties come from graham street market (central, hong kong) and could be found almost everywhere. got the name of the small one of them written in chinese, my bet is that it is a chi chien or closely related. the big one is mildly hot. vendors said they come from "china" (go figure...)

these three come from a thai grocery store in tai yuen street market (wan chai, hong kong). the conversation between the street vendor and myself was really comical when trying to identify the chillies. the vendor was giving me the thai names and when i was asking her to write them down in english she was saying that in english they were called chilli, chilli and chilli! i could make out (phonetically) that the middle one is a prik khee noo, identification of the others will have to wait until i find a thai speaker who can read what she wrote down. in any case she mentioned that the hottest was the first one.

these last two come from fa yuen street market (mong kok, kowloon). the first one seems to be the same one as the one from graham street mkt. the second one is a thai one, but vendor didn't know the name. also got a dry chao tian jiao pod (facing heaven) in a sichuanese restaurant which i already had seeds for and seeds from an unknown variety in a vietnamese restaurant (they said they were imported from there). i tried asking for fresh chilies in a hunanese restaurant but the waiter misunderstood and got me a small plate of seedless sliced chilli in soy sauce... (delicious!)