Beijing Food

Pineapple on a stick in Clare's room at Beijing University.

Baked potato on a stick at a street market near the outter-most subway stop in Beijing. Learn to love the housing blocks in the background.

Brunch at a rural village outside Beijing. I'm holding steamed dough, by far the most common kind of bread. The woodpiles in the background are used for cooking, household heat, and barrier construction.

Almost everything you buy on the street comes on a stick. The sticks in these baskets are all used, ready for recycling. As testament to the quality of the Mongolian barbecue in the background, only one stick in the entire pile still has any meat left on it. The stick in my hand holds up an ice cream pop. I threw it away elsewhere so as not to sully the purity of the pile.

Happy campers at the best steamed dumpling joint in Beijing. The plate next to the dumplings holds spicy corn and pinenuts. Taking customer service to new lows, though, not only did this restaurant make us pay for each item as we ordered it, it did not serve tea and ran out of rice. I miss it already.

Nothing tastes better than the first bite of sugar-spun popcorn...

... and nothing tastes worst than the last.

Breakfast in Beijing before heading to Yunnan: pickles, spiced bread, and sour yogurt.

After we watched a little kid slurp up a plate of garlic-tomato noodles at a Muslim alley restaurant, we had to order our own. When he got another plate, so do I. Dig the Coca-Cola sticker by the entrance (directly opposite an Arabic prayer script over the kitchen entrance). The guidebook is open to the section on food, but it took us four waiters before we found one who read Mandarin.

Good to the last slurp.

A crowd gathered as I ate up at a hotpot stand in a hutong off Tiannamen Square

You pick and pay by the stick, she drops it in the pot, steams it till it's ready, sauces and spices it. Options visible here include chicken, eel, pork, raw, baked, and grilled potatoes and tofu, carrots, rice noodles, quail eggs, greens, cabbage ....

Giant egg roll in the foreground, shoes, cigarettes, and watches in the background, across the street from Tiannamen Square.

My favorite: smoked tofu, grilled, sauced, seasoned, and spiced--on a stick of course. Dumpling steamers stack high off the hot pot behind me.

Oblivous to the Golden Arches behind my back, I sip a coconut in the cab.

Look, Ma, one hand!

"Dr. Stick," making it great, each time, every time.

Pasta circles, a foot in diameter, sliced into twenty pieces, combined with porous tofu, carrots, sprouts, cucumbers, ladled over with peanut sauce, coconut milk, and three other spoons of somethings good, tossed in a plastic bag, and served in a jumbo bowl. Best consumed with a peach juice-almond milk drink.

Giant flatbread, fresh off the grill, too hot to hold for long, too big to eat without folding, all in a beautiful alley setting.

The flatbread makers, ready to slice, dice, and even grind it as you wish.

KFC's Kompetition. Many drumsticks on the street outsized the Colonel's head.

Sipping sweetened yogurt out of an earthenware jar at a mom-and-pop alley stop. I love the colors in this picture.

You don't need the guy in the back to tell you I look funny sipping a coconut. This is an upscale alley, if such a thing can exist. Two-to-one says government planners still knock it down before the Olympics.

Felicity and I enjoy (?) sticky rice stuffed with raisens and other sweet treats in Beijing. Those bicycle carts in the background are often stacked higher than the rider's head. They can and do hold upwards of two dozen watermelons, even more than my stomach.

Beijing Fun

Hanging out on one meter of more than five million of the Great Wall. Built under the supervision of meticulous Lord Cai, this Huanghua section remains in excellent condition but relatively untouristed because of its distance from Beijing (sixty kilometers). Each inch here was said to represent a whole day's work of one laborer. Cai lost his head for his extravegence, but later rulers liked his attention to detail and posthumously resurrected his reputation. We'll see if Mao's so lucky.

After her brother's puny efforts fall short, a little girl tries in vain to defeat me in a long jump contest at a rural village outside Beijing where Clare and I slept and woke on the rooster's schedule.

Bead curtains made of plastic packaging labels lead the way to an elderly woman's dining room in the village.

When will they learn I cannot be defeated?

Clare fronts a bronze statue of a male lion holding down the world at the Summer Palace

Nice doors at a Summer Palace pit stop.

Another summer palace photo, this time with an animal composed of equal parts just-about-everything.

Everything in this picture of the Summer Palace grounds is curved. Cool.

A stick gatherer heads home a few feet from where we descended the Great Wall.

Go ahead, Mongols, make our day.

No guardrails on the Great Wall add to the excitement.

If the Mongols do get through the wall, they still have to face the mountain goats.

With a three highway strips, five cranes, and a dozen anonymous modern high rises in the distance, this is as typical a Beijing street scene as any.

Beijing vies to unseat L.A. as worst walker's city in the world.

I hold my ground at the military museum.

Felicity and a very special friend face the world from the entrance to the Forbidden City.

Clare, Mao, and I light up Beijing.

Pastoral purple on the grounds of the Summer Palace.

A morning donkey ride outside the village

Target practice at the military museum (4 shots for fifty cents, 10 for a dollar), or why I'm ready to move to Montana.

Sidewalk scene of the prototypical Beijing bicycle

Hide and go seek in an alley outside Beijing University

Don't be fooled by his tough-guy demeanor. This is a little kid who will cry if you don't give him an ice bar.

Truly the greatest entertainers on Earth are the bending, balancing, tossing, turning, flipping, flat-out-amazing athelets at Beijing's "Acrobatics Macrocosm." We tried to get autographs after the show, but everyone left before we made it backstage.

'There she is ... Ms. America.' Wait. No.

Lesson: the guards between the Forbidden City and Tiannamen Square don't like it if you take their picture while they're on duty. The flag in the background rises at sunrise and falls at sunset. Behind it, lies the Greek-style Mao-seleum, where the man himself rests in wax.

A garden shot at the Forbidden City, alas without the supplied audio commentary of Roger Moore.

Forget the detail work on this marble and focus on how on earth they lugged it to the Forbidden City from sixteen kilometers outside Beijing. The job took 20,000 men 28 days in the dead of winter, where they dug wells every third of a mile, poured water on the ground, waited until it froze, and pushed--hard--until it was time to dig again.

Now note the detail work. Since only the emperor was allowed to step on it, it's in pretty good condition.

Probably the least effective mode of transportation since the Lead Zepplin, these stone boats still look mighty stylish parked in the Summer Palace harbor.

Sweating the details on a Summer Palace rooftop.

Clare holds on for dear life as we look back on the wall we just walked.

This section was built before the Pink Floyd album.

Beijing turns the corner on fifty years of progress.

These roofs look really bad when they plop them on top of modern office buildings, but in the Forbidden City they hold their own.

Most Beijing streets are Mormon-wide and scarily well-paved. When the government finishes the highway system, current fifteen percent annual growth out to double.