Rob and I are on the train from Beijing to Mongolia.  It left early this morning.  He’s asleep and I’m taking advantage of the outlet in our compartment to catch up on writing.

It’s a 28 hour ride to the capital, Ulaanbaatar.  The Mongolian train is great compared to the train to Beijing.  No one is smoking and you can see farmland for miles out the window.  This time I packed better food – sandwiches, apples, cookies, crackers, soups and milk tea. So far, we have the compartment to ourselves.

The past week in Beijing was good, despite the worsening cough. Sometimes it gets so bad that it triggers my gag reflex or I can’t breathe.  Quite a few foreigners get the cough.  There’s something in the air and there’s little you can do other than wait for it to go away.

Both of us have had very little sleep, since I’ve been keeping Rob up at night.  Fortunately our Canadian friend was kind enough to let us stay for the week.  His place was quiet and comfortable.  During the evening when we were too exhausted to see more of the City, the boys would pick up some beers and we’d watch kung fu movies.

Rob and I met a super nice American girl who speaks Chinese fluently and went with us to sample Beijing food. We had a crepe-like pancake with fermented soy paste, green onions, an egg, lettuce, chili paste and a fried cracker wrapped inside. It was an odd combination, but it worked.  For lunch we tried hot pot, similar to the type of fondue where you boil meat and/or veggies in broth until they’re cooked and then dip them in a peanut sauce.

More on Chinese food –

In general, Chinese food is oily and boiled.  The food does not have flavor without oil and it’s not safe to eat without boiling it.  KFC has become hugely popular with the younger Chinese.  They love fried, salty, greasy meat.

For breakfast, it is common to eat noodle soup, rice porridge or steamed buns, always with a cup of soy milk.  Tea is induces appetite, but not usually sipped with a meal.  Lunch and dinner are similar – plates of meat and vegetables served family style with a bowl of rice. Steamed rice is eaten at the end of the meal to fill up, rather than with the meat or vegetable dishes.

Butter or cheese was nearly impossible to find outside of Beijing.  In the big city it was more than triple the price than in the States.  Baked goods were a total miss. The exception to the cheese was in Dali.  Yak’s cheese is a bland, very hard cheese stretched into sheets and then fried until it bubbled.

In the Yunnan province, we had Lijiang pancakes (a fried dough topped with sliced bananas), Yunnan coffee (which was inconsistent, but when it was good it was delicious), bitter melon (more like a bumpy, bitter squash), pickled cabbage, milk tea (a strong tea with milk and agar “bubbles” or coconut pulp).

Photos –

I’ll soon post photos from China on Facebook.

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