Happiness Is a Big Plate of Curry

This morning, we set out for Kowloon to visit a travel agent that I (Brad) found online. We were hoping to come home with tickets for a cheap but exotic package trip to some sun-soaked beach destination in Southeast Asia. We took the MTR to Kwun Tong (a station that I had never heard of), walked a couple of blocks, and found that the travel agent had nothing to offer us. We were both a bit crestfallen, as we felt like we'd wasted half an hour traveling all the way out to the middle of some random neighborhood only to return empty-handed. However, as we were walking back to the MTR, we passed through a mall, and I happened to look down a corridor to see a sign that said "CoCo Ichibanya." For those of you that haven't been to Japan, CoCo's is a famous chain of restaurants specializing in Japanese-style curry. It was my favorite restaurant when I lived in Japan, and Emily can confirm that I have actually had dreams about CoCo's several times since moving away from Japan back in 2002. Thus, today's discovery was beyond serendipitous. It honestly felt like an act of providence.

I was elated. (see photo) Obviously, we stopped for lunch, and we discovered that the restaurant was the first of its kind in Hong Kong, and had only been open for 2 months. I had my old "usual" dish: Chicken Cutlet Curry with 500 grams of rice, level 2 spiciness, with extra cheese (at CoCo's, you get to customize your meal, specifying how much rice you want, how hot you want it to be, and what sort of meat or vegetable you want in it). Here's the ol' Chicken Cutlet curry with cheese:
Emily ordered a vegetable curry (notice I didn't say vegetarian, as all the curry sauces are pork-based, which I think is the secret to their deliciousness). I think that Em enjoyed her meal, but I would say that I was a bit more excited.
Usually, we don't take our camera with us when we go out to run errands, but our new cell phones have cameras in them (I know this isn't as exciting to most of you as it is to us, but we've been living in Egypt for the last 3 years, where technology isn't as cheap as it is here). Thus, Emily was able to capture my first bite of CoCo's in 8 years:
It was delightful. (although I discovered that I can't eat as much as I used to. 500 grams, or 1 pound of rice was never a problem for me to eat when I was 22. Now that I'm 30, it's a bit tougher to put away).

Since we've been living overseas, we've come to realize that food is one of the easiest ways to make yourself feel at home in a new place. As you likely noticed in our post on chocolate chip cookies, we go to great lengths to insert familiar items into our weekly diet. It's a great way to add a touch of the familiar into foreign surroundings. If you would like to comment on this post, here's a question for you to answer: if you moved to a new city or country, which foods would you take with you to remind yourself of home?