Backtracking

Well, I've returned from my 10-week trip through Asia. Now it's time to go back and make sense out of my adventures.

On this blog, I think I'll concentrate on the food we ate. After all, I gained about 10 pounds on this trip, I want to have something to show for it besides the obvious.

So let's start with Beijing. Beijing, if you were not aware, is hosting the Olympics in 2008. This means that the city is in a state of constant flux, and will never be the same. So if you are at all interested in seeing the 'real' Beijing before they tear it down, GO NOW!!! There are huge neighborhoods being razed as you read this. I've never seen anything like it, at least, not on that scale. Seoul (and Korea in general) looks like "SimCity on fast forward" to quote my friend Justin, but they really have nothing on Beijing. Suffice to say, the guidebook we used to get around the city (Lonely Planet's new City series, The Best of Beijing) was virtually useless. One night, I must have called 6 different restaurants before I actually got one that still existed and was open when the book said they would be. Now, this is not to say that I was trying to make a habit of trusting The Book and only going where The Book told me to go, but we were only in Beijing for 3 nights and had already done the neighborhood walk. We were staying near BeijingZhan, or the central train station, so the 'hood was pretty developed (read: Starbucks).

Our first night there produced this fine meal. Note the purple vegetable. It didn't TASTE purple, strangely enough. The texture was sort of similar to thin asparagus. It reminded me of the Korean vegetable bracken. The duck was, well, rich enough to make me swear off duck for a while. Rich, dark meat layered with fat and a nice slice of crispy skin on top. Yeesh! Take a thin pancake (only 1 layer... the starch will diminish the flavors otherwise), add a piece or two of the duck, dipped in plum sauce, a few thin slices of green onion, fold up and swallow. Delectable. Repeat until you can repeat no more (the two of us were unable to finish... we tried, really!)