Eating Diaries, Part 1

I take photos of food.  Is this weird?  I've only come to realize recently that no one else outside my family takes photos of food.  Well, here goes my food tour of the weekend in Beijing.

Lush Cafe

I've dreamed about their fresh foccacia bread for two years now and finally got to enjoy a grilled vegetable sandwich with mozarella, tomato, and basil.  It tasted even better since I hadn't had Western food since being in China!  Lush is one of my favorite cafes of all time.

Wangfujing Snack Street

I had two 串 (chuan-r: kebabs), one was freshly made fishballs, I think.  I'm a big fan of eating anything from the sea and this fishball was really delicious.  They poured the mixture on a giant waffle-iron thing with 1" indentations and the person swiveled the balls every few seconds while they cooked in order to make the sphere of the fish ball.

Then I ate a octopus tentacle chuanr.  Roasted tentacles ranks pretty high on my list of favorite seafoods and while this one could have been cooked just a little longer, it wasn't too bad.

Then there are the things I did not eat at Wangfujing snack street:  starfish

seahorses and scorpions (still moving!)

Ganges Indian Food

This place has some of the best Indian food I've ever had.  This is a statement considering that I grew up in Dallas which has a huge Indian population.  Anywho, I made a mistake ordering my own curry but I did get a really yummy Vegetable Pakora for an appetizer.

TianChu MiaoXiang Vegan Restaurant

This may have been the best vegan restaurant I've ever been to!  It was so yummy and here are my favorite dishes from the dinner:

This was fried mushrooms in a salt/pepper chili batter.  It was really good and was a vegan version of a dish that is often  made with octopus tentacles (shocking that I like it either way, ha!).  Definitely the winner of the meal!

Sizzling beef was definitely my second favorite dish and was a textured veggie protein cut like beef (really weirded us out) and served on a sizzling iron platter.  An impressive display since vegetarian dishes usually lack this flair!

Airline Snack

I flew back to Qingdao and got a little surprise snack on my 1 hour 10 minute flight.  Dried dates!  Definitely one of my least favorite chinese "snacks" but only outranked by those dried plum things that my dad eats.

And that was my food tour of the weekend.  I should actually blog about what my apartment and campus looks like soon.  Oh, and the kids.  Right.  They're singing "As long as you love me" by the Backstreet Boys this week in my classes because they LOVE them.  Chinese kids also love Westlife.  It's really odd.  I had them singing "Umbrella" by Rihanna this week and it didn't go over so well with some of them, because it's not the type of music they listen to, but it was really amusing to  me to see them get into the 'ella ella eh eh eh' part of the song.  Until the next post...