Day 5 - Mucking around BeijingOct 17, 2009
|
|
Dear all
Well we had thought we would go to the Great Wall in the morning but in the event i woke with a mega headache so we thought better of it and took the day more slowly.
We walked up and down a road severa times looking for an English language book shop which we eventually found and which was not worth the trouble. Really a place for expats wanting to hang out as far as I could tell. We visited the Pearl Market and bought some pearls for incredibly cheap prices after some hard bargaining. We then went into the central mall area where everyone was out for a Saturday stroll and just enjoyed the strolling ourselves. We found a good foreign language bookshop with a great range of stuff.
I bought a couple of anthologies of personal reflection/narratives that might be good for Jill's project.
Dinner we went back to one of the local restaurants and had a fish dish that arrived in great stainless dish bubbling over a flame. The fish had come from the tank out the back - a carp. It was called fragrant boiled grass carp. And fragrant it was! Positively coated in Szechwan pepper corns and other spices and swimming in gorgeous ricch broth, studdend with little red bell capsicans/chillies. I'm not sure if this was a szechwan restaurant since we couldn't read much apart from the menu translations which John will report on. Bullfrog seemed to be a big favourite here. Again we followed our noses into this one.
Travel here very exhausting - not sure if it is China or i am just getting old or if i have just forgotten that travel can be so. But who would miss it!
Love to you all (I will ring people from Shanghai)
Warmest wishes, Joan
John's third entry
Hello everyone.
We are both sitting in the business centre at Beijing Airport waiting for our plane to Shanghai after an excellent stay in Beijing. If you are planning a trip to Beijing we reckon the Beijing Downtown Backpacker's Hostel in Nanluogu Xiang in Dongcheng is hard to beat. Plain rooms but a comfortable bed and such helpful staff for $15AUD a night each.
The highlights of Beijing for me were the people and the food. The first night we ate at a place in a back alley a couple of kilometres from here. Time Out said it had some of the best Beijing food in a courtyard restaurant. We expected a romantic setting but there was a raucous party going on in the main dining room and the waitress pointed to a table adjacent to the kitchen and a drain. Excellent. We ordered the sea cucumber of course, the tofu and shrimp, and a plate of delicious green weeds. Superb food. We ate Peking duck at a place called the Dadong (I think) in a rather flash looking restaurant. That was excellent but the other two dishes were stunning - one an eggplant dish and another a soupy tofu in saffron and with chestnuts. Both would dazzle at Vue de Monde or Tetsuya's. Then we went to the night food market which was hilarious but most of the food pretty dull except for a superb soup Joan had and a sort of thin pancake wrap with a mixture of cabbage, black fungus, beef and spring onion which I could eat all day. The crabs looked beautiful but tasted awful so we chucked them before they chucked us. The last two nights we ate at a local restaurant just at the end of our street. We just wandered into it on the almost infallible rule of going where crowds of locals go. The food here was more Szechuanese in style and god it was good. The Chinglish on the menu included such delicacies as 'cowboy bones' and 'Commander's pork intestine'. We decided not to go for the 'pig's colon fragrant sauce' and opted instead for the 'roasted grass carp' and the 'spring chicken'. Both were a new experience. They both had red pimentoes throughout the dish and were smothered in Szechuan pepper and had wonderful flavour, partly because of the fragrance of the pepper. We didn't go to the Great Wall or visit the olympic site, we only drove by Tianenmen, we missed galleries we wanted to see and only saw a truly third rate version of Beijing Opera. We needed another couple of days in this place just to do the basics but we would love to come back and spend more time here. We even loved the cabbies, some of whom tried to help us with our appalling efforts at speaking and most of whom were humorists, of course.
Zaijan
John
