Check out my China photos!

[Rick Lee]

This will be a long thread and I'll start out with just a few of some of the amazing meals I had and some stories behind them. Just got back to LAX today and Nostatic picked me up. Less than 10 seconds after he opened his trunk for my luggage, a super *****head of a traffic cop gave him (me) a ticket with no chance to move the car. Anyhoo, good to be back to warm weather.

This was on the first night in Nanjing at a pretty dingy place. I can't remember what everything was, but it was all good and dirt cheap.



This is breakfast on the street in Nanjing. A whopping 2 RMB or around $.32 for a sort of burrito with an egg, a fried breadstick, some chili paste, seaweed, bean sprouts and jalepenos. I had this several times.



Northern style hot pot with the in-laws.



I ate countless versions of this lamb skewer with cumin and crushed chili peppers. Just amazing stuff. This one was probably the best thing I had the whole trip. Just sinfully delicious and addictive as heroin.



This one belongs in the before and after thread. Here's the way before.



Here's a chef bringing our dinner into the kitchen through the dining room.



Had to walk through the slaughter room on the way to the toilet.



And the after photos.





The bright red dish is the blood, which my father-in-law really likes in the stew. I didn't bother trying it.



More to come...

[Rick Lee]

Enjoying some hot pot in Beijing with a Chinese co-worker.



My company's Beijing crew took me to lunch.



Can't go there and not have Peking Duck.





Mom and I getting some red bean buns and green tea for breakfast on the street in Beijing.



And here's where I finally got to eat dog meat. It's the dish in the upper left. Wasn't too bad, not too great. It tasted like overcooked roast beef. Of course, my father and I could not refrain from making every imagineable dog joke and pun. My mom even tried it. My in-laws actually brought their pet Pomeranian to the restaurant to sit under the table. Poor dog had no idea we were eating a distant cousin.



Here's mom and dad with some dear friends in Chengdu having the real hot pot.





This is a heavily spiced rabbit's head my friend in the above photo bought for me, thinking I'd like it. I think I offended her when I politely said thanks, but no thanks.

[Rick Lee]

Here's a real delight. It's Uighur food from China's Muslim minority folks. They's from Xinjiang Province, but are a Turkic people and this was in Chengdu. Lots of lamb, rice and super bread. No booze.



This was probably the best fish I ever ate. Just unreal. Pretty fresh too, as you can see.







Finished product.



Lots more photos and stories to come....

[HardDrive]

Looks like a great trip.

[cantdrv55]

Sorry but eff that. I'll stick to American Chinese food, thank you.

[Rick Lee]

This was in front of where we ate in Guilin.



Glad to see Chinese folks know about good college beer too.



This was a pretty good fish we had on the boatride to Yanshuo. We ordered the fish and then the bought it from a local fisherman who tied his boat to ours.



This might be the spiciest meal I ever had in China. All dishes were like fire and novicane in one. Very hot and I sure paid for it the next morning.



The in-laws later wanted some plain, steamed chicken to soften the spicey stuff.



I didn't bother eating any of this, but it was lunch for some folks.



You see this bacon and sausage stuff hanging from every balcony and clothesline in China.



Bacon to go.



My wife grabbed a few chicken feet to munch on at a hwy. rest area.

[nostatic]

Originally Posted by cantdrv55

Sorry but eff that. I'll stick to American Chinese food, thank you.

You don't know what you're missing. "American" Chinese food is crap compared to the real thing.

[Rick Lee]

I ate most of the stuff in the photos, never had a single piece of western or processed food, no cheese and came home about 10-15 lbs. lighter. And I drank a lot of beer every day too. That food is as healthy as it gets and super delicious. I haven't had American Chinese food in many years and will never touch it again. Oh, and most of these meals cost around $20 total for 4-5 of us including beer.

[Don Plumley]

Originally Posted by nostatic

you don't know what you're missing. "american" chinese food is crap compared to the real thing.

+1

[Gogar]

That's really cool, Rick.

[cantdrv55]

I could probably eat the stuff if it didn't resemble what it realy is. I can't eat a chicken head or Lassie.

[livi]

You like eating, do you, Rick? Any pictures of anything else but food?

By the by, how is the Chinese beer?

[Rick Lee]

Beer was pretty good, though a lot weaker than I remembered it on the last trip. I always try to drink local beer wherever I am (abroad only), but was unable to keep doing that this time after multiple disappointments. The fallback beer was always Tsingtao, which is pretty good and available everywhere. I did find a new one that quickly became my favorite called Liquan, made in Guilin. It was just like a real German Pilsener and ran about $.50 for a 600ml bottle on the street, sometimes almost a $1 in restaurants.

A few other random shots.

A very fast maglev train in Shanghai. On the way back to the airport, we drove past a radar camera station on the highway that was tripped by the speeding train and flashed a lot. Cameras are as ubiquitous in China as in the UK.



Some random street scenes in Shanghai.







This was a surprise. MG is very popular in China. I think I read somewhere that Buick is the best selling car in China and I think I can verify this. Too bad American car companies won't sell here all the cars they make, which are so popular in other countries, though I know MG has nothing to do with this.



Ah, true communism. Beijing.


Just a few steps away.


Man, it was cold this day.


Christmas is almost as big a deal in China as here, but for strictly economic reasons.

[Rick Lee]

Morning sword practice.



Badminton is very big in China. You see it everywhere in the streets.



Residential alleyway in Beijing.



Frozen moat around the Forbidden City.



For someone with agoraphobia, I didn't love this day. This was in Nanjing and shows what the streets can be like on some days.



A few friends from Guangzhou made the trip to Nanjing for my "Chinese" wedding. I don't have any photos of it yet, as I was busy at the time, but I'm sure my folks will send me the ones they took. Talk about a production that cost a year's salary for my in-laws. Sheesh. Oh, the girl on the left works for Porsche's importer in China, Jebsen. When I met her on the last trip, she asked me if I had ever heard of Porsche. Ha!



The very impressive Nanjing city wall.

[slow&rusty]

Awesome...more pics please!

Yasin

[1967 R50/2]

1. Your breakfast burrito is called a Jian Bing. Different versions of it all over China.

2. Duck Blood in hot pot doesn't usually taste like much. Next time try some Duck Blood soup. It's one of my favorite Sichuan dishes although you can get it lots of places.

3. Your Xinjiang meal looks like Chuan'r (kabobs) Da Pan Ji literally "Big Plate of Chicken" and Pilau.

Which Peking Duck restaurant? As it was a company banquet I'm guessing either Da Dong or Quan Ju De?.. although the interior doesn't look familiar.

Looks like you ate well. The food in China is just awesome, even if it looks bizarre to most westerners. Really..the best.

[Rick Lee]

More of the Nanjing city wall, which the one in Xi'an still dwarfed.









Some pretty well-preserved 6000 yr. old remains in Xi'an. They haven't really gotten going yet on getting this museum on the Banpo settlement up and running. But it's pretty cool.



The "Muslim Quarter" in Xi'an. Pretty good food here.







City wall, which was closed for renovation. Air quality and visibility in Xi'an were just awful, worse than East Germany ever was.



Enormous bell tower in Xi'an, which photos cannot do justice.

[Rick Lee]

Originally Posted by 1967 R50/2

Which Peking Duck restaurant? As it was a company banquet I'm guessing either Da Dong or Quan Ju De?.. although the interior doesn't look familiar.

The first Peking Duck meal was in a pretty popular place near the SciTech bldg. and Silk Market. The company meal was somewhere else near the office. However, I think we had better Peking Duck in Virginia, which really has some good places. Best duck we had was in a place we stumbled upon in Xi'an.

[Rick Lee]

I was too slow with my camera to catch this car on its roof before some passerbys flipped it upright again. We saw the story on the news the next day and the driver just walked away from it, bleeding. I think I saw a major accident about once per day there. Just terrifying road conditions.



This was a pretty cool place that lets you see how they make all the copies of the Terra Cotta Soldiers.







Mom, Dad and wife with a sort of cheesy museum giant Terra Cotta Soldier.



And the real thing, rightly called the world's eighth wonder. Words cannot describe how amazing an archaeological find this is.



They still haven't even opened the Qin Tomb up, which they found in 1974 and claim they don't yet have the technology to do properly. It took 700,000 laborers (slaves) 38 years to build this tomb. These soldiers were done with interchangeable parts, 8000 individual faces and all found holding shiny, unrusted weapons after 2300 yrs. in the dirt.

[Rick Lee]

Lesser known version of Terra Cotta Soldier.



Another very cool find, a Han Dynasty mini version of the Terra Cotta Army, found about 40 miles away from the Qin Tomb. Unfortunately, the translations were so bad that I didn't get much info on what all this was or how they discovered it. I need to read up on it.



And the photos everyone loves, the Pandas. This was my third trip here, so I didn't take many photos. We got to see a lot of them playing and wrestling. The babies were amazing, but were behind glass and so the photos didn't turn out too well.