Dining
Experiences in Beijing
By the time we arrived in Beijing we
were exhausted, and that didn’t change much the entire time we were there.
After 25 hours of travel time between the flight and the time change, you can
imagine that would mess you up quite a bit. We arrived on Saturday at 11:30pm
local time. Beijing was tough because of the lack of English spoken. You can’t
walk out onto the street and grab a cab unless you have your destination
written in Chinese on a piece of paper. English isn’t common unless you are in
a hotel, and even then it is only a few people that speak it well enough to
communicate. So many of our experiences consisted of pointing at pictures and
hoping they brought us out the correct things. We ate in the hotel a few times
because we were so busy all day that it was just easier to eat in the hotel
when we got back late. That being said we really had some awesome experiences
in Beijing.
The first of those experiences was a
type of hot pot eating known as Shabu Shabu. I had never had anything in the
hot pot style before, and it was a really cool experience. It was also my first
experience of not being able to communicate to anyone in the restaurant but the
people I was with. We had to point at things on the menu to order them, and
simply hope that we got the right things in the right quantities. We did wind
up getting all of our food, which was good, and it was a really interesting way
to eat. We split a hot pot in between the two of us. It came out as a boiling
bucket of flavor, something referred to as dashi. The meats, dumplings,
raviolis, noodles, and vegetables all got dropped into the boiling broth and it
cooked them up in mere seconds.
One day while out seeing the Huotongs,
we walked around an area around a beautiful lake and had food at a restaurant
upstairs in one of the buildings. The specialty of the place was Hunan cuisine,
a cuisine from the Hunan province in China known for its dry heat. It is
slightly different from Sichuan cuisine, which is known for its numbing heat.
We ordered a delicious dish of stir fried duck and chilies, but I couldn’t tell
which of them there was more of. We also ate some spicy gourd, some fried rice,
and some delicious spicy little crispy shrimp that popped and oozed with salty
sea flavor.
We ate plenty of Chinese food while we
there, but we did have one experience that was a step above the rest. It was
yet another place that we had to point and order, but they are definitely
pretty good at putting big pictures of the food on the menus so that you can do
such a thing. This particular place was funny because of the experience we had
been having with our driver. He kept telling my girlfriend's parents no when
they made suggestions and he drove us past the restaurant that they wanted to
go to in order to take us to the place that we wound up eating at. I am not
sure of the name because it was in Chinese, but boy was the food good. We
ordered hot and sour soup, orange glazed beef, stir fried pork, fried rice, and
these dough creations that we stuffed with veggies.
To be continued...
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