Shanghai with Suzhou Interlude

We hadn't planned on it, but somehow we ended up making a day trip out to Suzhou with our friends Ela and Arrin. It's called the "Venice of China" because it has a bunch of canals, but having been to Venice before, Suzhou has very, very little to do with Venice. It's too bad it was a last-minute trip, or I might have been able to have gotten in touch with my Uncle who lives out there during the summer.

Popsicle for breakfast!

Some kind of Chinese pastry. Mine was filled with red bean. Not sure what Sue's was filled with.

For lunch, we just stopped at a randomly chosen little restaurant on a small street.

Shuai/ jiao~ (water boiled dumplings).

I wasn't totally sure of what the lady said at the restaurant, but I think she said this was pork tendon.

Sliced beef with onions, chilies, and cilantro. Supposedly one of their best dishes.

Another popsicle break. Matches my shirt well.

Yet another popsicle break.

Just before leaving Suzhou, our driver took a wrong turn and we ended up going on a small street with a lot of street food. The street eventually dead-ended, and so after turning around, we had the driver let us out and we went and grabbed a bunch of eats for the road.

Some kind of pancake-like object. You get to apply your own sauces.

It turned out to be filled with some kind of scrambled egg. They also stuck some lettuce in the middle.

The bag o' loot!

I think this is some kind of buckwheat (?) cake.

This looked kind of like a fried burrito/chimichanga. It was not stuffed with rice, beans and cheese, however... rather, it had potato in it.

For dinner back in Shanghai, Sue and I met up with Lester again for some all-you-can-eat Shabu-Shabu (Japanese-style hotpot).

Plate of raw pi/ jio~ nio/ ro\ (literally "beer beef" or what they like to pretend is Kobe beef). You eat this raw. We finished off four plates of this between the three of us. Beer here was only 5RMB (about 80 cents) each.

Lester, Sue and me.

After dinner, we hopped in a cab and headed over to the Bund (the river running through Shanghai). Lester took us to a trendy bar (13 on the Bund) to view all of the lights and lit-up building on and around the bund.

View from the bar's patio.

Inside the bar. Sue had a mango mojito, and I had an "AK-47" (some drink with mango and passion fruit).

I had been hearing Lester talk about the foot massages in Shanghai for the past several winters each time we would see him over Christmas/New-Year's break. So we went to his favorite massage parlor. Yeah, this isn't really food, but it's part of the entertainment I guess.