My Taiwan Adventure

  Peking Duck of course!!!!! It's so amazing! I got to have it both times I visited Beijing and I stuffed myself until my stomach hurt. I literally had a belly for the rest of the trip.   Peking Duck (Peking was the old way to say Beijing) has been around since the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) and is considered the national dish of China. That is not to say that people haven't been roasting duck in ovens since before then. Special ducks are bred to be cooked this way. What's special about this dish is that the skin is very thin and crispy and it's often eaten in a pancake with scallions and sauce.   In the restaurants the cooks will cut the duck in front of you as part of a show.   Here's the pancake with scallions and sauce. It looks like a crepe, yes...and my focus was way off.   Thankfully there are no pictures taken of me eating this, because I'm really fanatical about my Peking duck. If you ever get a chance to try it (...

So I've been to Beijing two times...and quite a few years apart as you can tell by my hair. What I think of China is always going to be biased by my intrinsic quality of not being Asian- so a lot of the culture I don't understand quite yet. It's also going to be biased by my time in Taiwan where the culture is similar but manners are completely different. My first impression of Beijing is always the buildings- big, short, stark rectangle shapes (Communist style architecture). The city is so spread out that you HAVE to take a taxi or subway everywhere. Hopefully the only places you want to go are near a subway station because taxis are few and hard to come by. Usually someone's already waiting for a taxi before you...or they take the taxi you're hailing. There's not very many patches of green- maybe the pollution destroyed all the vegetation. That's another big thing- pollution. When I went the second time I especially noticed the smog that seemed to ha...