Beijing - Food

Here we are having breakfast at the Hotel, had a massive selection of food for breakfast which suited me being a "big breakfast" type of guy. There was seven different cereals, one morning thats all Hamish had, three helpings (or as Caleb likes to say, loads) of cereal. The hot food catered for the standard western breakfast, bacon, meatloaf, pork or chicken sausage and a man standig behind the servery cooking eggs to your liking. As well as this there was curry and roti, Congee (don't know, didn't try, some sort of soup), cooked veges, fried rice, noddles and my favourite, dumplings. There was alos a wide range of fresh fruits. So you can imagine what sort of breakfast I ended up with, lucky I worked out in the hotel gym, not. This is the photo of the Donghuamen Night Market we found on one of our many walks around Beijing, it's just getting started here. All these stalls were selling all sorts of food, cooked as you wait.

Here we are on the first day at a restaurant our guide took us to on our first day, we took the opportunity to dress up on stage and get our photo taken.

Here we are at the Peking Duck place we went to, it was pretty expensive, about $100 NZ, the duck was ok but the sweet and sour liver was not really my cup of tea.

Here's the place we went to on our second night in Beijing, we were pretty happy with ourselves. We found this place about 1km down the road from our hotel, two floor under ground. No-one spoke english, we ended up pointing to the food we wanted and passing over money until they stopped taking it, the meal cost 38 yuan or about $6NZ for all four of us. We were the only westerners and everyone seemed to be looking at us, sat at one of the tables and felt like the new kid at school.

Here's a photo of some food we weren't willing to have a go at, scropians, seahorse, starfish and some sort of gub thing.

The food in Beijing was great, hence the 6 kilos I've put on since we've been away.

Beer in China costs $0.5NZ a bottle, the local beer is Tsingsao (or something like that) and is very drinkable. You can buy Chinese whisky in 100mL bottles for $1NZ and that's not to bad to drink either. At our lunch on the second day they had bottles or whisky on the table so me and Al drunk it, made walking up the wall a bit harder than it should have been.