My Adventures in Beijing & Beyond: Necessity is the Mother of Friendship...

...or so I've found in just the past week, in which other expats and myself have latched onto each other, creating this little English-speaking island amidst a sea of Chinese speakers. Coming from Orange County, I never in my life thought I would feel more comfortable around non-Asians than I would around Asians. But here I find myself gravitating towards the foreigners simply because it's easier to express myself with them. As Richard Rodriguez kept harping on in The Hunger of Memory, culture really lives in the language of a people. And I have never felt this more keenly than now.

The other night I met up with another college friend and we went to the Quanjude, the famous Peking Duck restaurant where the duck is specially smoked in fragrant wood chips and an expert chef comes to your table and carves out perfect, delicate little slices of duck skin and duck meat.

Our duck was number 44,951 to be served by this particular branch of Quanjude. Here was our chef deftly slicing choice bits of meat from our duck:

And the fixin's included very neatly sliced scallions, cucumber, duck sauce, sugar and garlic, as well as special thin pancakes made of some kind of root vegetable, and lettuce leaves. We also got some vegetable dishes on the side, specialty juice mixes, and the weirdest of all, duck tongue captured in this crystal gel substance. Once you get over the weirdness of eating duck tongue, it was actually pretty good. Next time we have to try the tree frog ovaries.

Lastly, for dessert we had a dish my friend said was a specialty of Beijing, and I can't remember the name but it was __ __ Pingguo, or chunks of apple battered and fried, then covered in this hot, sticky syrup. It came with a bowl of water into which we had to quickly dunk each caramelly piece before the whole thing congealed into a rock-hard mass:

For lunch today, some team members and I went out to a place called Secret Garden Cafe, where the decor was very posh and we had some fiery hot Hunan food (Hunan being the province where Mao Zedong grew up).

The most notable dish was fish head in soy sauce and red and green chilis:

After work, we followed the lead of a guy who has been working in this area for a while and went to this food court at the Zhongguancun Plaza and Shopping Mall. There we were greeted by a rich variety of Chinese, Indian, Korean, and other foods I couldn't identify.

Armin got some kind of flavorful, spicy noodle soup with braised pork, pickled mustard greens, and egg (12 Yuan). Joe got some kind of very spicy chicken stir fried with chilis. Aki got a plateful of pork and chive dumplings. And I got this chicken, vegetable and rice stir-fried and served in a lotus leaf for flavor. Mmm good, and so cheap, at only 14 Yuan (less than US $2).