China!
Early on the 23rd Neil and I left sunny Manila and its Christmas festivities for the wintry cold of Beijing, China. Although 2 weeks sounds like a long time, I knew it would absolutely fly by. We left early on the Friday morning and after a 4 ½ hr direct flight we arrived in Beijing. Flying over China was pretty interesting as it was all brown – coming from green Philippines it seemed a bit like a barren desert with patches of civilization every few hundred kms. Of course, we forgot for a moment it was the middle of winter and most things were frozen!At first, landing on the tarmac Neil and I were a little freaked out being in a new city, a new country with all Chinese characters everywhere, and 0 degrees temperature . . . but that happens whenever I land in a new, unfamiliar county. But I knew my dad was meeting us at the airport so we had it pretty easy really! After a few administrative hurdles at the airport including a bit of critical analysis of my passport we grabbed our bags and met dad who had been waiting at the arrival gates. He took us straight for lunch at a German restaurant – Shillers after which went home to his apartment and dumped our stuff and freshened up while dad went back to work for a little while.
Chinese artist at work at the Flower Market
Dad lives to the north west of the main Beijing CBD in an area called Chaoyang. But of course Chaoyang is about the size of Quezon City here in Manila where we live – there are probably over a million people and many kilometers that make up the ‘suburb’. And as expected, Beijing is huge. But the other thing about where dad lives is that it is handily right near ‘Ladies Street’ (‘Lai Tai walk way’ as a westerner would say in Chinese!) which was handy for directing the taxis. ‘Ladies Street’ is so named because there is a flower market there that has I guess expanded to include clothes, a few trinkets, some Chinese art and food stalls. So that’s where we spent our first afternoon exploring a bit of the Chinese market culture. Neil bought an all important beanie and we shared our first bowl of Chinese noodles from the street side stalls.
Neil outside the flower market
Emily eating the noodles outside Flower Market
After dad finished work we caught up for a while and then went down the road to one of his favourite Chinese restaurants for some lunch down the road– Happy Duck. We ordered so much food I was in heaven! We had chili spinach – cold spinach leaves with a little bit of spinach and peanuts in a yummy light dressing, sizzling beef, some green veggies, rice, and a brilliantly presented sweet and sour fish. We tried one of the local brews – Tsing Tao – which got full beer marks from me, and of course drank tea. We waddled home cold, but definitely full! It was a great first day in China.
Neil at dinner observing the amazing presentation of the yummy sweet and sour fish
posted by batik billy @ 3:07 pm
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