Beijing to Shanghai (Thu)

Conference over. Nate and I have a morning to kill before heading over to Tsinghua University, and then later to the airport.

Not really that pretty.

But in the basement, we find a hot-pot counter. Sweet.

And we ordered too much food, and it cost next to nothing anyway.

Coffee break. I just thought it was interesting that they used coffee grinds in the ash tray.

Weird sculpture on the Tsinghua campus.

This building is supposed to have some significance, but I forgot what it is. I think it's just one of the old buildings on campus, but there were a lot of people taking pictures of/with it.

Off to the Beijing airport, where some thunderstorms end up canceling our flight. We had to go through multiple rebookings before we got it all settled. Didn't depart until well after 11pm (we were supposed to get to Shanghai by about 10pm).

Noodles in the Beijing airport while killing time.

Fried chicken bits. (Same place.)

Beijing (Wed)

I had one of the last two talks of the conference today (there were two such talks due to parallel sessions). Normally, there are not that many folks left at this point because a lot of people only attend one or two days of the conference, or have flights on the last day and have to head out early. I actually had good attendance at my talk, largely due to the fact that people were hanging around for the trip to the great wall...

I had not been to this section of the Great Wall (I forget the name, but it was about a 90-minute bus ride from the Hotel). Had to hike up a bunch of stairs just to get to the wall (or take a gondola, but that's no fun!). This was similar to parts of the Incan Trail, but you don't have to do it at altitude which makes it a *lot* easier.

Old worn-out ramp.

It was cloudy/foggy that day, so the pictures aren't as nice as they could have been. I ran up this stretch in one go and was seriously wheezing by the time I got to the top.

End of this section of the wall.

Donkey at the side of the wall (I'm on the wall looking down). We assumed that this belonged to one of the ladies selling water and other souvenirs/trinkets.

For dinner, we had a huge group head out to a Szechaun restaurant. We had three full tables worth of people crammed into a little private side room.

The restaurant.

Suan Mei/ Cha/ (sour plum drink).

Fatty pork (was very popular, so we ended up ordering a second one).

Duck gizzards.

Pickled veggies.

Gelatinized tendon.

Bai/ jio~ (Chinese rice wine... 52% alcohol/104 proof). Strong stuff.

Prawns in Chinese glass noodles (fen~ si).

Ko~ shui~ ji (literally, drool chicken... in that it's so good just seeing it will make you drool. Probably a bit of an exaggeration).

Catfish in oil. The Szechaun peppercorns are supposed to make your lips numb, but this was very weak. Somewhat disappointing.

Spicy diced chicken and peanuts.

Beijing (Tue)

Met up with Mauricio and some of his Intel buddies for breakfast. Yio/ Tiao/, assorted buns, and soy milk.

Lunch at the shopping mall food court. Got some hand pulled noodles and some boiled dumplings. You can see the noodle pulling guy in the middle of the photo behind the yellow sign (didn't get an action shot).

Dumplings (so good when they're fresh!).

Noodles (too much cilantro, boo!).

Interesting way to advertise to you... displays built into shopping carts.

Dinner that night was at the Chinese "Hall of the People". This is similar to their equivalent of congress or the senate where their politburo meets. Regular folks don't usually get to set foot in there. We were to be treated to something like a "state dinner".

The official invitation. No entrance without one.

Hall of the People from the outside.

The banquet room where we had dinner.

Nice painting of horses.

Mao leading the Chinese people.

Of course all of the ethnic minorities are at the very back of the line.

Random cold dishes/appetizers.

The menu (for those of you who can read Chinese).

We had a nice performance with various classical western and Chinese instruments.

There was much jockeying for good photos.

Shrimp in a tomato-y sauce; in background are some weird tater-tot like things, except bigger and with some stuff in the middle (I think it was some ground meat, maybe some diced mushrooms, and sauce).

I think this translates into Golden Thread or maybe Golden Needle soup.

This was bizarre. Half-way through the meal, they brought out little pieces of cake!

Some kind of bun.

Duck, but not peking duck. The sauce is different and the duck skin is not so crispy. But otherwise the serving method is similar.

Kalbi-type ribs with sugar-snap peas.

Some kind of pork on the left, and fried rice.

Asparagus and carrots.

Deep-fried salmon.

Overall, I wasn't that impressed with the food, but I think the menu was designed to entertain visiting foreign dignitaries as opposed to a random Chinese person who grew up in the states.

After that, we wandered our way over to Wangfujing street.

Tiananmen square at night.

Mao was still attracting plenty of attention from tourists at this hour.

Mmm... scorpions. They were still wriggling around on the skewers, so you know they're fresh! We had a lot of people chowing down on these critters (after frying).

Other meats/parts/species on sticks.