Ah, THIS is real food!
After a long flight from the US to China, I arrived late at
night on Monday, and eventually managed to fall asleep. Waking up after three hours of sleep, I was
famished, and though I really wanted to explore the city and find an
adventurous breakfast (I loathe hotel restaurants), I just was too hungry and
disoriented to try it.
I ventured into the hotel’s buffet breakfast with low
expectations. It was $10 for the
breakfast, which I figured couldn’t buy too much. I was wrong!
They had western and eastern breakfast items available. I settled on BOTH. I had a fried egg, but also a salted duck
egg. Chinese pickles – which were just
like kimchee, and various salads that I would have guessed were lunch items,
but they were good and I ate them.
Celery salad (it looked like a sliced papaya salad which is what I
thought it was when I took it, but it was quite good), corn and red bean salad,
sliced cucumbers, a mysterious cube of tofu (I think?) in an even more
mysterious plum colored sauce (I wasn’t a fan), fresh squeezed orange juice,
and coffee with hot milk. It was such a
delicious breakfast, and I ate a lot.
That turned out to be a good thing, because in an attempt to
get the electronics equipment I didn’t have (who would have expected Ethernet
only connections in the hotel room – not me, my computer doesn’t have an
Ethernet port!), I decided to venture out on the town for the entire day. I headed to an electronics store on the other
side of Beijing, and then to the Forbidden City. I had intended to grab lunch near the
Forbidden City, but didn’t see a place, and once inside, didn’t want to leave
and come back, so I explored all day – but missed lunch.
I met up with a former student of mine and her boyfriend for
dinner, and they took me to a restaurant featuring Northern Chinese/Korean
food. It was amazing. Like hot pot in that there was a central spot
on the table where the food was cooked – but it was a charcoal grill with a
cast iron grate the meat was placed on, not a pot of liquids. We had beef, and beef tongue, lamb, squid,
fish, bi bim bop, seaweed salad, a crispy orange dried fish of some sort, the
food just kept coming, and it was delicious!
The day ended well.
Today – my first working day in China – I repeated the
buffet breakfast in the interest of time before my morning meetings and was
able to have lunch before the afternoon meetings began. I went to a Korean restaurant, and had the
most magnificent bi bim bop (I admit that I have a problem. I LOVE bi bim bop). What was amusing to me was that the hot sauce
came already in the stone pot. None of
this add-hot-sauce-to-taste-at-the-table-so-Americans-can-just-avoid-it-entirely
nonsense. It was already in there. And it was good! And the best part? Lunch came to a grand total of about $7.
Yeah, I could get used to this. The biggest question of the day? What will I have for dinner?
