We did a ridiculous amount of eating while in China. Our tour guides always brought us to these huge restaurants where we'd be served some little plates of nuts or veggies and a pot of jasmine tea, followed by beer, rice, and 3 to 6 giant platters of food, followed by fruit for dessert. We started realizing after a while that our guide was watching us eat from a distance, and if it looked as though we were running out of food, he would order more for us!
Our first night in Beijing, we were taken to a kind of "tourist" restaurant where Chinese women performed dances on stage. Here's Sangho enjoying the huge meal...
We drank tea from a dragon!
The dancers
Here, at another restaurant, we are about to be served
Beijing Duck .
This restaurant we visited on our own after we went to Yonghe Gong. We decided on this place because they had an English menu. Someone had been kind enough to write out the lengthy menu in English with a pen and some notebook paper. We chose kung-pao chicken (my favorite), spicy tofu (it wasn't that spicy), and this fish (it was delicious!).
Not only did I learn that half the population (maybe more) of China rides a bike, but that ANYTHING can be transported via bicycle. Some of the things I saw being towed on bikes included large stacks of plywood, a wooden dresser, a sofa, and other humans. In this picture, a man is towing a tin drum of... something...
Here, a woman at a tea shop demonstrates how to prepare Chinese tea. See the little clay thing in the glass on the right? That's a "lucky baby." To test whether the water for the tea is hot enough, you can pour it on top of the lucky baby, who has been soaking in a glass of room temperature water. If it's hot enough, water will come streaming out of the lucky baby's, um, thingie. She demonstrated this test for us, and the lucky baby peed all over us.
One of the best parts of our trip to Beijing was seeing the acrobatics show "Reverie." It was amazing! Here you can see some girls balancing and twirling umbrellas on their feet. They also turned the umbrellas right-side up... with their feet... and twirled them that way. They then added more and more and more umbrellas. If you want to read more about this show, go
here .
If you have a fear of "squat toilets" like this one... don't go to China. I think I saw maybe 2 "western" style toilets the whole time I was there!
