Explore the great cities of the world!
I feel like my trip to China ended on a fantastic high. This was due to 3 reasons: the Summer Palace, the Peking Opera, and the dinner I had between the two. You’ll have to wait for the Food Diary to read [Read more…]
Well this is interesting. According to my notes, the first thing I had to eat on Day 10 was garlic bread. You would think I would remember having garlic bread in China. But I don’t. (It must have been overshadowed by the fantastic Italian meal I had the previous evening in Tianjin. Also, it probably wasn’t all that memorable.) I very much recall the fried squid rings I had while exploring in the Houhai area in the afternoon. Hot and tasty!
For dinner, I was excited to go to Crescent Moon, a Uyghur Muslim restaurant. There were 2 waitresses. One was clearly Asian-looking, probably Han Chinese. The other wasn’t Asian looking at all. My guess would have been Greek. Most likely, this waitress was Uyghur, an ethnicity related to Turks. I needed to use the restroom after wandering all day. I went through the door labeled for the restroom. I found myself in the frigid outdoors. I found the (very dark) men’s room up a cold, dark alley. Weird. But this is why we leave our own world to explore others. Right? Right!
The bloodiest war of 20th-century Asia was the Second Sino-Japanese War, or as it’s known in China, the War of Resistance Against Japan. You know it as World War II. (Okay, technically it eventually became part of WWII, but you get it.) Notice the word “Resistance”, reminiscent of the European resistance against the Nazis. Like Germany, Japan was looking to absorb neighboring lands to access natural resources needed to fulfill the needs of its densely [Read more…]
After a day in Tianjin, I was on the homestretch of my trip with 2 final days in Beijing. On these 2 days, the weather warmed up enough that I felt comfortable unzipping my jacket and leaving off the hat and [Read more…]
In the morning, at the train station in Beijing, I finally had my first (and last) chocolate croissant of the trip. (A week earlier, I had gotten a plain croissant in Shanghai.) If anything proves how different China is from Europe, it is the fact that I only came across one chocolate croissant on the whole trip.
