Chinese food! In China!

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?