The epic quest for Subway.

Picture this scene: I had just bought a lamp at Ikea in Causeway Bay and I was hungry. I needed food. I wasn’t sure where I was going to eat, but I figured I’d go back to Tsuen Wan for dinner. And then it hit me.

Flashback to a couple weeks ago when I was complaining to Xiangwei that I missed Subway (edged on also by the fact that she kept telling me she was eating Oatmeal Raisin cookies). At that time, I did a search online for Subway restaurants in Hongkong and it turned up 8 locations, although I didn’t remember where they are.

Now come back to present day. I decided that I wanted Subway and I would go on a quest to get it. So fair enough, I had my iPhone. I had maps. And if you know the iPhone maps function (and this is also a description for those who don’t), you’d know that I can just search a word (like the name of a restaurant) and it’ll show me the nearest one to me (considering also it knew where I was, which it did).

So I searched Subway and it turned up a placed called Metropark Hotel Causeway Bay (not the Wan Chai one that had HK’s first H1N1 Influenza A case), which I really wasn’t sure about, but decided to make my way there anyway.

After establishing my bearings, I started walking, in the pouring rain, towards the hotel where I hoped to find a Subway restaurant. This is where it all goes downhill.

Now if you remember a post I did almost a month ago called One month on: Singapore vs Hongkong, one thing I should’ve mentioned (although now that I look at it, I didn’t) is that like Singapore, Hongkong has a ton of foreign domestic workers. One thing to note now, is that on weekends, these foreign workers swarm. As in really swarm. I don’t know why they do it, but they all come out into the city and sit in front of closed shop fronts, seemingly to talk.

Now that that’s been established, you would understand me when I say that after a few minutes of walking, I inevitably found myself in Little Manila (that’s not what it’s really called, but there were an awful lot of domestic workers there and most of Hongkong’s domestic workers are Filipinos).

This scared me for three reasons:

• I hate crowds with a vengence
• It was raining cats and dogs, and for some reason, people still open their umbrellas under shelter. This wouldn’t scare me originally but since an uncomfortable experience which involved an umbrella hitting my left ear yesterday, I was wary.
• I really hate crowds. I can’t emphasise that enough.

So I did the only thing I could do (which at the time seemed like a pretty stupid thing to do, but refer to point 3 above). I started walking away in a completely different direction with no idea where I was going. I just had to get away, and get away fast.

Somehow or other though, either by sheer dumb luck or by my unusually keen sense of direction (that I probably inherited from Pap), I managed to find my way back to Causeway Bay MTR station where I accessed the Internet and found out that the Metropark hotel that I got on my iPhone Google map wasn’t on the list.

I therefore trudged on bravely, armed with this new found information – the address of a Subway in Wan Chai where I could take a minibus towards home. Unfortunately, I had no idea where the road that my culinary haven is located, and so I actually walked an entire round (in the drizzle) before my iPhone told me how to get to the place.

But in the end, I still couldn’t really find it and I was really pissed. I mean really pissed. Friends who know me well know that I get really grumpy when I’m not fed. Really grumpy. I walked through the streets of Wan Chai like a man on a mission of revenge when I saw my hallowed address: 20 Luard Road and that lovely, lovely green, yellow and white sign.

I walked in to familiar furniture and a smell that owns every other sandwich maker. I was home.

Everything in Subway Hongkong is pretty much the same as in Singapore. After all this time I finally got my Meatball Marinara, cheesed up and toasted with all veggies except onions and jalapenos and honey mustard sauce in a meal with double chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin cookies. And what’s more, there was a Wi-Fi connected called “Subway Wan Chai” which really made the whole experience all the merrier.

What an end to the weekend! I couldn’t ask for anything more. It was simply brilliant. Subway, eat fresh!