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.

Beijing

Chinese breakfast!

Top left: radish strip buns (luo/ buo si bing~), top right: hot soy milk, bottom: oil sticks (yo/ tiao/, a.k.a. Chinese donut).

Scallion pancake.

Xiao~ long/ bao.

We biked around Beijing this day. For lunch, we stopped at a random restaurant. We got spicy diced chicken with peanuts (right) and peas with beef (left). Tasty, but even this was still too much food for lunch.

We wandered into a shopping mall just to see what it looked like. At the top, there was a food court (as is true with pretty much all Asian malls), and we got some refreshments. Mine was a mango slushie with tapioca, and Sue had the same, but with watermelon instead of mango. Cold and tasty!

For dinner, we wandered off to a Tibetan restaurant. After some wandering about being all turned around (man, I really appreciate those maps at each and every exit in the Seoul subway system), we finally made it.

Some random Tibetan beer. Not particularly good. The fact that it was warm didn't really help either.

Left: spinach and paneer (Indian influence on Tibetan cuisine I suppose). Right: Tibetan bread. Has more similarities to da\ bing~ (big bread, common in Muslim-Chinese cuisine), similar in that it's fairly dense, but this bread was thicker.

Baby mutton ribs.

Left: Raw yak! Sort of like tartar in consistency (and in concept), however, the spices made it almost taste more like salsa. On the right are little millet (I think) balls that you eat with the yak. This was actually my favorite dish as it had a really good flavor.

Beijing

For brunch, we wandered into some random dumpling shop (I could recognize the chinese characters for "bao zi~").

We got two kinds, although they look the same from the outside. One was filled with veggies (yo/ cai\) and the other had pork. It also came with some chinese preserved vegetables and some thin gruel. Pretty tasty overall.

This is going to be a recurring theme. It's already summer time here, and so we made many ice cream/popsicle stops throughout our trip.

Popsicles again. Mung (green) bean and mango or something citrusy I think.

Dinner. Appetizer: sorghum dumplings. The skins were kinda chewy.

The obligatory Peking Duck. We decided to get this out of the way the first night. I was good, but not really any different than the Peking Duck I've had in North America (Toronto).

And then it was off the (in)famous night markets! WARNING: pictures of gross foods below! Not for you wussy-pants, I-only-eat-fish-and-chicken-breast eaters.

This was pretty cool. Just one long block of stall after stall of food hawkers. You could smell the stinky tofu from a distance.

Variety of skewered treats. Interesting mix... top right strawberry and mixed kiwi/strawberry. Bottom left, plump silkworms. I think the others are all also buggy things.

More buggy things on sticks.

Small scorpions on sticks (maybe about 1.5 inches long each).

Much bigger scorpions at top, some sort of grasshopper/locust bug at the left, the same small scorpions as before at the bottom, and I think more silkworms at the right.

Various meat skewers. The white stuff at the bottom right is stinky tofu. The squiggly things above that are phalluses of some animal (lamb I think). Most of the rest is not too scary (squid, lamb, maybe some kidneys). I also picked up a coconut for drinking as you can see in my hand.

Centipedes! Ok, all of this walking around looking at food is making me hungry...

We'll start off light with some centipede. This was actually kind of disappointing because there was very little substance to it. Whatever was in the centipede itself I think got squished out by the skewer. All that was left was a little bit of crunchy shell and some legs. (Sue even tried a nibble of this!)

Let's take it up a notch. So I snagged a skewer of the little scorpions. They fry these pretty thoroughly, so all you really taste is oil, salt and crunchy (well, that's not really a taste). These were better than the centipedes because at least you had something to chew on.

Cruising for my next snack. More skewers.

Crabs. They looked sort of like Dungeness, but the shape was a little rounder.

Time to up the ante! Even I was a little hesitant about eating this, but I figured, what the hell! These were chunky, crunchy, meaty suckers. Out of all of the weird things so far, though, these guys were probably the best. And yes, you eat the whole thing: body, legs, wings, head, eyes, guts, etc.

This is what they looked like before going into the deep fryer.

More lamb skewers. These were a lot more expensive than where we got the skewers the first night. I think these were more like 50 cents each, which is still cheap. These are also a little bit bulkier than our 7 cent cheapies.

Last fried item of the night: sea horse. This was actually the grossest thing I ate. Everything else was just salty and oily. This was actually bitter and just did not taste good. I had to grab an ice cold Coke to wash the taste out of my mouth. (BTW, Asian Coke tastes better because they use sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup.)

Seoul to Beijing: The Trip Begins!

So after Sue's DevCon trip in Las Vegas, she flew to Seoul where I met her at the airport, and then from there we flew to Beijing. I'm only going to be posting food items here. If you want the full non-food report, you'll have to go to thelohs.net where all of that stuff will eventually end up.

First food item: Korean food at the Incheon airport while killing time waiting for our flight (Sue arrived at like 5am local time and our flight wasn't until the afternoon).

Pumpkin porridge for me.

Sundubu for Sue.

Pearl milk tea in Beijing. Tapioca was a little too soft for my liking. Also could have been colder.

Wall-side kabob vendor. We just ate a few lamb skewers as a snack, but they were dirt cheap. 0.5RMB each, which is like 7 cents!

The skewers weren't particularly large, but how much do you expect for 7 cents?

For dinner, we just went into a random restaurant on a side street. First major test of Gabe's forgotten Mandarin. We ended up ordering way too much food.

Left: sweet and sour pork (I think the waitress recommended this to us because we're foreigners... grrr). Right: diced chicken (ji ding) with bell peppers and spicy red peppers. This dish had some heat to it.

Whole fish in a brown sauce with bamboo shoots and mushrooms. The food was all very tasty. We were the only lao~ wai\ (foreigners) in the joint. For way too much food, it only cost us about $8USD. Can't complain.