Beijing - The Basics

China was an interesting place to visit.  We weren't really sure what to expect - we've both been to some pretty dirty and poor cities, and we weren't sure if Beijing would be another one of those, or more of a Sydney-style city.  As it turns out, it's more towards the Sydney end, although not totally.


Once we arrived, we discovered that it was in fact Golden Week - a week long holiday for the entire population which sees people go holidaying in droves.  Unfortunately for us, this brought huge numbers of people from the rest of China into Beijing, so the place was absolutely packed.  That in itself was an experience.


The pollution was fairly bad when we arrived, but it rained that evening and the rest of our time was perfectly clear.  

I assume these lanterns were for the festival.  This was the pollution on the first day.

We figured out how people were eating pretty quickly and had some delicious food while we were there.  Rice comes in a small bowl per person rather than on a share-plate, and you eat it straight from the bowl.  You also eat straight from the share-plates with your chopsticks - no spooning it onto your own plate first.  In most of the restaurants that we ate at, we were deliberately sat by the window by the waitresses - we think it was as bait for the other white tourists to show that it was safe for non-native speakers to come in.  It tended to work - we were often the only non-Asian people in there when we walked in, and there were quite a few more when we left.  In this restaurant, we had a delicious spicy chicken that was more chilli than chicken, a nice chicken with peanuts and veggies, a grilled cauliflower dish, and the most awesome pork buns that I have ever eaten.  And it was about $10 each.  

One thing that I wasn't expecting while we were in Beijing was to be asked to pose for photos with random Asian people.  I think during our 4 day stay we were asked about 10 times to pose for photos.  Originally I thought that maybe it was a ploy to get near our pockets, or that maybe they were kidding, but they all seemed to be legitimate about wanting photos with us - we're still not sure if it was the white skin (winter-computer-monitor-white in my case), or the blonde hair (which isn't that blonde, let's be honest), or something else (maybe we looked funny?).  Can anyone shed some light on this?

The trip to the foreign supermarket is always a bit of fun, but I don't think that the Chinese really understand chips.  Of the flavours available, hot and spicy soup and prawn I could almost give them, but lemon tea and blueberry?  We bought a pack of the blueberry chips for research purposes, and I can attest that they are disgusting - the sweet flavour of blueberries really doesn't match the salty potato flavour of the chips.  No photos, but the Donghuamen Night Markets were also an exercise in food-related disgust - all sorts of things were sold on sticks including offal, scorpions, octopi, seahorses, and my personal gag-inducer, starfish.  Ugh. Needless to say, I didn't eat anything.

One of the better food-related things that we did was to hit up a roast duck restaurant.  When they say "Duck Restaurant", they really mean it - there wasn't much on the menu that wasn't duck.  We ordered Peking Duck which was fantastic, after we got the hang of it.  Stephen enjoyed showing off his skills.