Horrible Chinese Food
If you don’t know the reference, go to leisuretown.com and memorize everything on it until you get to the phrase “Horrible Chinese Food”. When this has been successfully tattooed on your back, you are in a position to talk to Boris. I wonder if Leisuretown is blocked by the great firewall: it doesn’t have any sex or talk of human rights.
So far this trip we have eaten:
- United Airlines meat loaf and chicken with rice from about the time the flight attendant told me that FAA policy forbids using GPS on board (it doesn’t but arguing with flight attendants does not give a satisfactory result. They haven’t got the memo from the TSA that absolute power means you can be funny at times, like the agent in Denver with the Burning Man badge who said he couldn’t wait to get out in the desert and blow stuff up; or Chris at SFO who was so cheerful so early in the morning that I commented on it and he said, Well I’ve had my cocaine this morning! I suppose that’s gen Z slang for coffee, just like Molesting is slang for spooning, all culturally defined evils end up as commonplaces once you consent to talk about them and if you don’t, they get forgotten and you’re back in the 1950’s. It’s a real conundrum for Ms. Grundy. But imagine if I had said anything about blowing stuff up and taking cocaine in an airport.)
- some special airline top ramen over Alaska, made with super thin noodles that theoretically can soften in the safe and sane hot water served off the carts, but, not.
- turkey and cheese sandwich and lasagne just before we flew into an hour worth of thunderstorm remnants coming into Beijing.
- a set of satay-like sticks from a street stall on Shatan Houjie, the small street where the wonderful Shatan hotel is, including seaweed, oyster mushrooms, an undocumented sausage, and tofu, followed by noodles in a hotpot cafe that were a slightly elaborated version of what we had on United Airlines.
- a wonderful breakfast buffet at the Shatan Hotel. They are highly recommended by TripAdvisor and it’s easy to see why. It’s a three star hotel (I still haven’t figured out exactly what that means, but it has to do with services offered rather than how well they deliver them). If you need a gym or room service or a pool to make staying at a place worthwhile, then you can’t be happy here, but if you don’t use those services anyway, you will find that Shatan Binguan is about the best deal in town. In addition to having a nice room where everything works including the Internet and the sunflower showerhead in the white lizardskin tiled bathroom, the front door is 600 meters from the north gate of the Forbidden City. That’s closer than the South Gate is. The breakfast buffet has about thirty items and they are all interesting, including two colors of congee and a rack of shredded things to put on them before you even get to the wall of steam tables. And a bunch of Western stuff but who wants that. The only bad thing about the buffet is that we don’t get to sample the jiaozi and wrapped things at the defacto buffet running the length of Shatan Houjie.
- The Big Duck Tourist Restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf, Da Dong.
There are a lot of ways for restaurants to cut corners. Just for today’s example, they can specialize only in main dishes and be perfunctory about sides. This does not make a restaurant automatically bad. Think of Duarte’s over in Pescadero. A small menu but great. But also one must think of The Olive Garden and Harris Ranch and a whole lot of chains where everything comes with sliced green beans and slightly undercooked carrot sticks and your choice of three reconstituted potato dust configurations from S.E. Rykoff, or, these days, Costco.
Da Dong makes a great show of their Peking Duck. The chef wears a mask and gloves and carves at the table and the Evian Water costs only a little bit less than the water at the French Laundry, I kid you not. Difference is, you have to drink bottled water and this was the only brand they had left. The waitress trainee showed me how to fold the duck-make using chopsticks only, which is a knack right up there with the YouTube video on folding t-shirts, the mysterious East at its Eastiest. YouTube is not blocked. I found several videos ot “The East Is Red”, not all of them satirical.
But you know, the Peking Duck at the restaurant of the same name on El Camino and Cambridge in Palo Alto is just as good, maybe even better. Peking Duck is not that variable, it’s like a fried egg, it can be bad but even a diner can do it perfectly. And Peking Duck’s other dishes are even better. Not even to mention Hunan Garden, where a lot of friends came to see us off last week.
The thing about charging by the tablespoon for duck tongue and morel soup is, it had better be really stellar. It’s one thing to make stock from a Maggi cube if you are a United Airlines supplier or a corner bar charging $4 for a full meal for 2, but you should really think about these things if you are trying to impress the tourists. No shredded cabbage in soy sauce and vinegar. The watermelon slices over dry ice had better be perfectly ripe. The pear juice should not be brown and diluted, if you can’t get anything but cheeku concentrate then take it off the menu.
Best thing: a fruit juice from some unknown entity called Elizabeth Melon.
It wasn’t bad, it was only 335 RMB, we just haven’t found yet the circuit that Michelin will give stars to when they come to Beijing. All this sightseeing gets in the way.
And what gets in the way of sightseeing? Being a sight, that’s what. We must have been photographed a hundred times yesterday at the Forbidden City by Chinese tourists who wanted to pose with our beards. (Most of the tourists here are from China). It really gives a glimpse into what it must be like to be Angelina Jolie. We would be mobbed for 15 minutes at a time and end up disappointing people when we actually tried to go into a building at the Imperial Palace museum and use the tickets we’d spent $10 apiece for.
The Forbidden City is, what can I say, it’s forbidding. Exhausting. Go there at dawn on a nasty day in winter unless you are into people-watching. I saw one Che t-shirt. At least as an American I am taller than most of the others. That is less true of the young people.
Scam of the Day: touts who say they are art students and invite you to see their Graduation exhibitions. I thought the first ones might be telling the truth but after hearing the same line from a variety of middle aged hustlers, I doubt them in retrospect. It is an OK diversion to see what’s being sold in the way of non traditional art. The ones who approach you inside the Forbidden City are wasting ticket time though. Forbidden City needs to sell three day tickets, like they do at Petra.
SCAM TWO: holy cow. you know how ATMs don’t echo your key strokes when you type in your PIN code? The ATM outside the clock museum doesn’t echo your keystrokes when you are typing in the amount of money you want to withdraw! And the keys behave strangely! My first try it told me I was trying to withdraw too much, probably because I hit 2-0-0-0-00 trying to say 2000 and that’s how you would say it at Wachovia in Palo Alto, and the next try it skipped a keystroke and I ended up withdrawing 200, for which $30 transaction I will pay the usual $1.50 fee. AMP. Don’t use an ATM if it doesn’t show you what you’re typing.
Well, the East is getting Red somewhere behind these buildings outside our windows, time for another day of hard driving tourism.