The Hong Kong Students Assocation

Be sure to buy Septa tokens ($1.45) beforehand, otherwise you can pay $2 at the counter or on board the trolley.

Students near the Quad: Take any eastbound Trolley from the 37th and Spruce station (the one under the trolley display). Change to the eastbound Market-Frankford Line at the "30th" station.
Students near the High-rises: Take the eastbound Market-Frankford Line from the 40th and Market Street station.
Students near Hill: Take the eastbound Market-Frankford Line from the 34th and Market Street station.
Click here for Septa route map

Afterwards: Exit Septa at the "11th" station, then walk to the opposite platform via the overhead passway and enter the Gallery Shopping Mall. Take the escalator one level up and walk through the corridor in between Lady's Foot Locker and the nail salon.
Locate the Chinatown Friendship Arch and congratulations! You've reached Chinatown!

For those of you who prefer a quicker way of getting to Chinatown, simply call a cab and tell the driver to go to "10th and Arch Street" or "Chinatown".

Cab companies and numbers:

Located in the heart of Chinatown and one block from Convention Center, the Ocean Harbor Restaurant promises you a time to remember. They serve Dim Sum daily. Special lunch, dinner,and the banquet room are also available.

Flashy authentic Chinese cuisine with familiar American ingredients from Chinese chefs trained in the show-off art of Hong Kong cooking. Exquisitely fresh fish and seafood, steamed or stir-fried. One of Philly's biggest and best spiffy bargain dates, the menu features everything from barbecue pork egg foo young to braised abalone with oyster sauce to imitation duck served in a tangy sweet and sour sauce.

This red, green and gold, slightly shabby space is a favorite for both traditional Chinese specialties and good dim sum on the weekends. Trust the food to be tried and true, with a few surprises, like Hunan lamb, or shrimp Szechuan style with chili. The dim sum includes slippery rice noodles with whole shrimp, scallop dumplings, bean curd, sweet steamed buns with pork inside, and many more.

Imperial Inn is a big name in Philly dim sum, having established itself in the 1980s as one of the city's better places for chuk (congee) chasing. A dim sum destination spot in crowded Chinatown, with an extensive array of Szechuan, Mandarin and Cantonese dishes, and a crowd that is equal parts Asian and adventurous eater.

These days, the crowds are still filling two floors on the weekends, but the red-saturated banquet hall is a bit dated and musty. They don't come for the decor (there isn't much of one), but for the food. The fried Phoenix roll is a specialty: lobster, shrimp, crab, chicken, mushrooms and bean sprouts. Imperial Inn also serves a pupu platter, so you have an idea that this is Chinese for American palates. Those who need more excitement will enjoy the sweet and spicy grandpa chicken, or spicy sesame noodles.

For the most part, Imperial's carts are riding on the restaurant's decades-old reputation, and the dim sum is mostly sub-par. Allow the soggy shrimp toasts, gloomy beef tripe soup and desiccated pan-fried dumplings to pass you by. Instead, hold out for the pastry cart and choose sweet dishes like egg custard tarts and pineapple buns, best enjoyed with a hot cup of chrysanthemum tea.

If you love authentic tasting Chinese noodle soup, this place is highly recommended. The smooth and chewy hand drawn noodles closely resemble the texture of Japanese ramen. Watching the chef twisting and stretching a piece of dough into noodles is a highly entertaining performance and might be another reason for eating out at this place. If you're visiting for the second time, you can also try out the knife sliced noodle.

For the non-adventurous, beef brisket noodles is your choice, although the meat can be fatty at times. Oxtail is generally not recommended as getting the meat off the bones makes eating very laborious.

On the sidenote, vegetarians may want to steer clear of the vegetarian soup. It offers nonthing but three leaves of spinach - nothing more than its cheap price.

If you're not looking for a restaurant with great surroundings, but one with dishes served hot straight from the wok, Ting Wong is the place for you.

Ting Wong is a great hole-in-the-wall restaurant. The decor is not fashionable and the service is not spectacular (sometimes the wait staff can forget you're there) but the food is what you are there to enjoy.

With a second location in New York City, Ting Wong does serious business on the cheap. Inspired dishes include marinated cuttle fish on rice, liver pork belly congee and breakfast special Chiang Fun dried shrimp with fried dough.

Sang Kee's eatery - serving Philly for more than 25 years - has made succulent duck a Chinatown staple.
Classics like the namesake Peking duck - which arrives in two stages: breast slices with crunchy skin attached for stuffing inside warm pancakes are followed by stir-fried vegetables with shredded duck meat- don't need updating. Neighboring restaurants may have larger menus or more elaborate preparations, but Sang Kee's roasted meats can't be beat.

Other dishes worth mentioning include the thousand year egg and pork or pig blood congees, the crouching dragon prawns with shredded taro root, and the bean curd skin rolls, served with shrimp and shiitake mushroom.

Crispy sea bass, called sea dragon, is a mild dish that can serve two people, and chicken with string beans in garlic sauce is quite spicy. On the safe side, four seasons (chicken, shrimp, beef, pork and vegetables) is always good.

This is a more intimate spot, with the ubiquitous pink cloths. Try the coveted shark's fin soup with shredded chicken or seafood, at least once, for it is quite expensive. It has a faintly gelatinous, rich flavor that is much prized by the Chinese.

Try the salt-baked soft shell crab, pan-fried tilapia or "famous" seafood roll. The Fried Stuffed Bean Curd is tofu sliced into eight bigger-than-bite-size rectangles or squares (we've seen both) and - you guessed it - fried to a welcome crisp. They place a tiny ball of shrimp in a little cuplike hole on top before serving the snacks with mild soy sauce. The texture is similar to a mozzarella stick, without the deep-fried-cheese guilt.

More traditional specials include cubes of steak with honey walnut, and fried bean curd with three types of mushrooms.

Banana Leaf, a Malaysian restaurant situated in the center of Philadelphia Chinatown invites you to dine in a Malaysian atmosphere in a specifically decorated environment and brings on your tables the flavors of the Asian world.

The huge dining room can service tons of people, and fast, with dishes emerging from the steam and clatter of the open stainless steel kitchen. The flavors of Malaysian cuisine are sweet and pungent; the sauces are dense tapestries of ginger, galangal, garlic, lemongrass, shrimp paste and chilies. The compulsory starting point would be the achat, a salad of green beans, julienned carrot, cabbage and cucumber spears pickled with vinegar, dyed golden with turmeric and tossed with sesame seeds. Nasi lemak is the ultimate combo meal: stewed chicken in a rich ginger-coconut gravy; sambal ikan bilis, a kind of relish made from fried anchovies, onions and tamarind; slices of hard-boiled egg; and achat flank, a mound of coconut rice scented with cloves and pandan leaves.

With a menu of more than 100 appetizers and entrees drawn from several Southeast Asian cuisines, Penang is the place to be if you're craving the stretchy pancakes called roti canai, or deep-fried tofu stuffed with peanut sauce, or lemongrass-infused sting ray. The metal awning over the open kitchen is a designer's wink at the beach shack/street stall origins of many of these dishes.

There are curries and noodle dishes and crunchy calamari; even an omelet with baby oysters is a must-try. Mango chicken features tender slices of chicken breast served in a mango shell on top of a bed of rice noodles.

The choices are many, and the friendly staff will modulate the seasonings for picky palates, and advise you wherever they can. There is beer and a number of sweet fruit drinks, which are enjoyable with multi-seasoned fare. The food comes out in a hurry, which can leave you feeling rushed.

Though its entrance may look shabby, Asia Supermarket offers an unexpectedly wide array of food and products that can make your stay at Penn homier.

Ranging from frozen meat to freshly packed Chinese vegetables, popular instant noodle brands to frozen dumplings, Chinese seasonings to Chinese tea; you might accidently spend a lot of money during a single visit to this supermarket. If you are trying to find saucepans, frying pans or other cutlery, this place offers it all - with unknown brands at a discounted price. Hot pot ingredients such as fish balls and beef balls are also conveniently located in the many freezers at the back.

While buying a week's worth of Chinese vegetables might be tempting, do keep in mind that the vegetables only last for a few days in the fridge. Furthermore, some brands of food may be suspectible to bad quality. So stick to the big names and try avoiding the obscure.

Not comparable in size to Asia Supermarket, Chung May Food Market specializes in another niche: more sophisticated drinks, foods and snacks.

To illustrate: Chung May sells Japanese Milk Tea, favorite Hong Kong paperpack drinks in large cartons and Japanese ramune (glass marble lemonade). Foods include Japanese curry , Chinese cooking sauce packs, large cartons of Shin Ramen (Korean spicy instant noodles) and premium sticky rice. Also on sale are multiple variants of Pocky by Glico, Fran by Meiji and many more.

Similar to Asia Supermarket, Chung May has a small section for cooking utensils and cutlery. They also sell salted preserved food such as fish, sausage and duck.

At first glance, REMI KTV's entrance with a bar table and bar stools look nothing like a karaoke box. But when you get comfortable on the couch with a playlist of your favorite songs, this place can definitely become a blast to spice up your life at Penn.

Firstly the pros: You can't expect REMI KTV to have all the latest pop tunes, but it still offers all the classics in Cantonese, Mandarin and English (maybe not so many in English). What's more, it has upgraded its TVs to plasma flatscreens that display spectacular video quality. What's more, BYOB is possible without much age concerns at all!

Secondly the cons: The song selection system on the computer has a Chinese interface, so make sure you have a Chinese-reading buddy before going. There are only two mics per room dispite the room size, so don't attempt to ask for more. The mics are not wireless, therefore passing around the mics can cause some major wire tangling. Finally, the decor and furniture can be a bit worn out, just keep that in mind.

Some advice: You might want to bring more friends because rates can be expensive, especially for late hours and weekends ($20~$30 per hour). If you want to save money, sing during the afternoon on weekends or on weekday nights. ($10~$20 per hour) Clarifying the rates prior singing and clocking your session can also be useful since the people there often make calculation mistakes. Sometimes the echo and music-vocal balance can be very akward. Feel free to adjust the sound settings on the panel in the cabinet under the computer for an optimal experience. Lastly, 1 dollar water and sodas are available at the front desk.

Given Americans don't regularly have dark straight hair, it just isn't safe trying to ask for a haircut in an ordinary American salon.

Although not the best, Hong Kong Station prices a blow, dry and cut session at $10 for men and $15 for women - reasonable for a trim. Some prefer Wilson, the male hairdresser. On the other hand, some have tried out the female hairdresser and gave positive comments. Either way, they both speak Cantonese and make friendly conversation with you during your haircut.

Be warned that long lines during weekends can result in waits ranging from one to two hours. An average haircut lasts 30 minutes.

Known, or at least believed to be the cheapest place to buy phone cards, Fortune Gift Shop offers two types of phone cards that best serve calls to Hong Kong:

(1)$9 for 750 mins (~1.2 cents per min) or
(2)$4 for 280 mins (~1.4 cents per min)

Before you make your decision, however, note that phone cards expire in 3 months once you start using it. Also, the shop owners seem to understand Cantonese, but they definitely prefer Mandarin. In case you haven't used a phone card before, this type supports cellular phone dialling, so you don't have to worry about finding a land line. A trick that can save you the trouble of inserting the PIN number everytime is entering #15## after the first time you enter the PIN.

Nothing near the quality of Saint Honore in Hong Kong, but still a better place for those who want an egg tart or a birthday cake ordered.

Looking for authentic bubble tea? Here's the place where you can find bubble tea for merely three to four dollars. Offering a variety of flavors such as classic, coconut and green tea; Rising Tide Chinese Restaurant remains the point where Hong Kong people converge after a filling dinner in Chinatown.