Bejing Food

We ate like kings on our tour. Every lunch and dinner we sat around a table with a “lazy Susan” that was filled with delicious food. We tried Beijing (Peking) duck several times at different places. It was the best duck I’ve ever had. The meat was so juicy. It reminded me of ribs back home in Texas. Another time it was served with rice paper and thick black sauce that poured like molasses. You put what you want inside the rice paper and make something like a taco. We also had pork in green bell peppers, nuts with chicken, three kinds of mushrooms with spicy red peppers, bacon with tofu, asparagus and lots of vegetables and more. This was for one meal. One of my surprising favorites was fried eggplant stuffed with pork.

We also had Coke, Yanjing beer, and sometimes rice wine. Rice wine is more for cooking than drinking. It was awful when I tried it. It burns and has no taste. Will, a father who came on the tour, called it rocket fuel.

While we were eating, it was funny sometimes because someone would turn the wheel while someone else was trying to get their food with chopsticks. We each had to learn quickly how to master chopsticks. Luckily, Will was from Hong Kong, and he taught us how to use them. But it was still a bit difficult. Sometimes food you wanted kept going past you. If Caleb, Stephanie, Jaron and I had eaten with just Chinese people, maybe we wouldn’t have gotten to eat anything. All of us dropped something at every meal without fail. It was funny and frustrating. I was getting the hang of it by the end. I developed my own method of holding them, and it worked for me.