Beijing

First stop: breakfast!

Beef noodle soup (nio/ ro\ mian\).

Glutinous rice (moji in Chinese, mochi in Japanese, and I guess tteok in Korean) wrapped around your ice cream! This was actually pretty tasty.

Zong\ zi~ (sticky rice wrapped in a bamboo leaf). This one had red dates in it, which I wasn't crazy about, but it wasn't horrible.

We took a boat ride up to the Summer Palace. When we got off of the boat, there was a mob scene so we had to go find out what was going on.

Turns out it was the sweet potato vendor.

They're simply sold by weight, as measured by this highly accurate measuring device.

After patiently waiting in line while trying not to let too many Chinese people cut in line or steal our potato, our reward. This is so simple, but it was absolutely delicious.

Soy milk.

Later that afternoon after getting back into Beijing, we stopped off at a somewhat ritzier tea/snack shop called Chamate. We would discover later on in our trip that this was a chain. We would also later on have our encounter with Jabba the Hutt (but that's a different post).

Hot, mixed-fruit tea. A little too sweet.

Yam fries. Pretty good.

Fermented rice (jio~ niang/) with assorted tapioca balls (some had stuff in it like peanuts... never seen stuffed tapioca before).

Curry pastries.

Fresh pineapple. All of the tour books say don't eat fresh fruit unless you peel it yourself otherwise you'll get the runs. Well guess what, you'll get the runs regardless of what you eat, so you might as well enjoy eating whatever you want. Neither Sue nor I got it really bad; building up your immune system has its benefits. Anyway, yeah. Umm, fruit. Yummy.

Somehow we ended up back at the 7-cent skewer joint. We ate some more lamb skewers, some chicken wings, and shared a bottle of beer. After that, we also somehow ended up back at the street food market.

Bottom: venison skewer. Corn item: grilled corn. Drink: unknown brown stuff.

Soup buns. These are steamed buns, but they've got a bunch of soup in the middle. The straws are absolutely pointless. If you suck any soup up through them, you will incinerate the inside of your mouth. We're talking serious burns (we proceeded very cautiously and did not get hurt). Overall it wasn't that exciting, but it was just different so we gave it a try.


The end of Sue's strawberry skewer, and my fermented rice drink.