During my Hong Kong Cinema trip, our hotel offered a complimentary English-style breakfast with different items each morning, including eggs Benedict on an English muffin, toast, hash browns, cornflakes, sausages, coffee, pastries, and baked beans. In Hong Kong, Many hotels serve both English and Cantonese breakfast options side by side, which reflects the city’s international identity and history as a global commercial center. Many Hong Kong cafés, or cha chaan tengs, serve western-influenced foods alongside Cantonese dishes like macaroni soup with ham, milk tea, and pineapple buns. In addition, the English cuisine, originally comforting to English travelers, reflects a colonial history and the expectations of international travelers like myself, who have accepted this to be a staple of HK breakfast. Yet, it is now a part of Cantonese cuisine. This experience connects to the GEM learning goal of intercultural understanding because colonial legacies have shaped my idea of good service, providing familiar food, and can more broadly affect how tourists perceive ordinary experiences like hotel food. It also made me more aware of my own positionality as an American traveler. Rather than immediately engaging with unfamiliar local foods each morning, I gravitated toward what felt recognizable and easy, in addition to fancy. I think because I am used to an American hotel continental breakfast, an English-style breakfast at first seemed posh and therefore exciting.
Artifact Breakfast Image:
