Dumpling Banquet

duck-dumpling
Originally uploaded by Wasting Moments.

Had a "Dumpling Banquet" at a restaurant called De Fa Chang this evening. Consisted of 2 cold dishes, 16 different varieties of steamed dumplings, and a final course of dumpling soup. All that, plus 2 half-liter bottles of Chinese beer, for 80 Yuan (about 10 bucks). The reason I mention this is to point out how inexpensive it can be to travel in China. 4 star hotels can be had for 65-100 US$ a night. You can get a room comperable to what you'd get in a Holiday Inn or Best western for half that. The dumpling banquet is the most expensive meal I've eaten so far. Plane tickets are cheap, a full day's tour is really cheap, admission to sights and museums is cheap.

The cold dishes at dinner were interesting. One was a delicious plate of some kind of sea-weed. The other... well I managed to eat about three of them, left the others on the plate. I'm pretty sure that they were pickled chicken's feet with hot peppers. I've got pictures of that, too.

The dumplings came in varieties like pork, ham & corn, shrimp, walnut, yam, beef, vegetable. Some of them are shaped like what's in them, like the duck pictured here. Hopefully eating more duck won't lead to another losing week in fantasy football.

Tomorrow, I'll be taking it a bit easier. I'm going to go to the local Shaanxi Museum, which is supposedly one of the 4 best in the country. I'm also going to check out the inside of the bell and drum towers, walk down to the wall, and maybe wander around the Muslim Quarter a bit. I think I'll actually take advantage of the free internet and do a bit of conference prep in the evening.

A few notes to some of you out there:
-I've been able to read comments by getting to the blog through an anonymizer type proxy. I'm pretty certain blogspot is blocked here in China.
-Hank, thanks for the frequent comments, and the updates on your work schedule. Tell CMET that I said hi. Tell Brenda that if she wants a counterfeit, low quality, cheap-as-hell Louis Vatton bag, she should post a comment. Funnilly enough, I wandered past a Louis Vatton store this evening.
-If there are more of you out there lurking and not commenting, I'd love to hear back from you. Let me know what you want to know more about, see more of. More pictures of food? More pictures from museums? My mom wants to see more pictures of me, but that probably isn't going to happen.
-I'm surprised none of my librarian friends are pointing out errors in spelling and grammar. Hopefully I'll come back to these and clean them up someday. For now, it's all the time I have to write them and keep seeing stuff.