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After having a rather long day out & about & with my knee acting up, we decided to stop & get some food for dinner. WOW, what an experience that turned out to be - one that we won’t be forgetting any time soon.

As most people know, I have several life threatening food allergies (Milk - all dairy, Wheat, Rye, Oats, Barley, Eggs & Peanuts). It really does make finding food a rather tiring and wearing exercise, I never really start to relax until dinner is over & am on my way, without needing to use any epi-pens or having to call an ambulance. I love to eat, so whilst I am somewhat used to the whole exercise, it does shit me.

I have a couple of translations of my allergies in Chinese (Mandarin) which I have been using. Yesterday it took them about 30 minutes to work out what I could eat, but thank goodness they had a menu with pictures, so I was able to gauge if they understood my allergies. It is always nice when you see something like Pork Buns or Won-Tons & they say NO (meaning you can’t have this) on the menu, it gives you some confidence that they at least seem to somewhat grasp what you are allergic to. I probably give people a little bit of time to work it out too, as it is a bit of a list to get through. Too often I have seen something on a menu that I am so obviously allergic to & been told, “Yes, you can have this” - Crap, get me outta here quick!

Anyhow, we were welcomed into a rather happening looking restaurant & ushered to a table near the door. They gave us menu’s, which were written in Chinese script only (no pictures), so we knew straight away that this was probably going to be interesting. I showed them my piece of paper with my allergies written on it, which was passed around to pretty much most of the staff, a few people laughed (fair enough, not often that you might see someone with that many allergies) and once that was over with we set about working out what to eat, with the aid of a phrasebook (good for some sentences - but normally pretty shit for trying to convey anything to do with food) + a English/ Mandarin - Mandarin/ English Dictionary we also used some pointing (at food) & making animal noises, much to the amusement of people there.

We started out pointing to things in the dictionary (Mandarin/ English) the head waiter actually looked after us the whole night, although it felt like he was more there to make sure that we didn’t embarrass him bu eating in a culturally inappropriate way (which I think that we still managed to do). He asked if I could eat Rice, Mutton, Beef, Wings (I clucked like a chicken) & he managed a smile & nodded, so we figured he meant Chicken wings, Cabbage, Potato ….., it went on for a while, there were a few characters that he pointed to in the dictionary, which were parts of other words, which I didn’t understand, so I just said no to them. Geoff noticed some people having Hot Pot behind us, so we thought that we might just order that, with meat, which we did.

We ordered drinks, Geoff got a beer (which so far have been HUGE through the parts of Asia we have seen - Seoul, Mongolia & China & very cheap) & I ordered a juice, which came in a bottle about 1/6th of the size of Geoff’s beer (I was feeling a little ripped there). They brought out the big Hot Pot (which was a big dish of boiling water (with a burner) with chilli, ginger, garlic etc in the water to flavour + the sesame based sauce that you dribble over all the meats that you cook.

The sesame sauce was a bit of a heart stopper, as we first thought that it was peanut based, a really nice sauce though, which you mixed chilli, & other spices into yourself - YUM!

There were several different meats, some sort of octopus, beef, pork & lamb (lots of meat), which was all cut quite finely so that it cooked quickly in the broth (hot pot). Then we started to get other dishes, like chicken wings on a stick, rice, & several cabbage dishes. The table was filling up, we were happy to eat at a leisurely pace, but then the head waiter decided to help us out & started to cook the meat for the hot pot, at first we thought that perhaps it was due to us not cooking it the right way, but as soon as he had cleared a few of the plates that had contained bits for the hot pot they were replaced with more plates of food - Holy Shit!!

We finally worked out that he had not been collating a list of food that I could eat at the start to workout what we could eat on the menu, we had in fact ordered at least one or more dishes with those ingredients in them (cabbage, chicken wings etc) - in total there were 13 different dishes of food. Not only did we have a full table of food, but we also had a trolley next to the table with more food on it (the greens for the hot pot). We had to tell them no more, we were full (they still had more dishes coming apparently - holy crap!!!). The leftover food didn’t all go to waste though, we took a lot of it back with us to eat over the next couple of days.

That has to be one of the funniest experiences that we have ever had, it was nice to have so much Chinese food, I actually feel like I got to sample a decent amount of Chinese food (it seemed like the whole menu), which is nice, as I love Chinese, but my allergies can be somewhat restricting. Good to end up with that much food over here too, it ended up costing us $30, it would have easily been about $200 - $300 in OZ.

Seeing as we arrived on the weekend, we took advantage of this morning to drop off our passports to the Vietnamese Embassy to get our visa put in. We couldn’t get it before we left OZ, as it would have expired before we even reached Vietnam, so unfortunately we had to do it here.

From there we headed to Tiananmen Square, which to be honest we both found a little disappointing. It wasn’t until we went to The Gate of Heavenly Peace (15Y ea) & were able to look over Tiananmen Square & look at the pictures on display of past historical events there (everything was written in Chinese, so all you could do was look at the pretty pictures) that we appreciated it a little more. Getting into the Gate of Heavenly Peace was interesting though, first we had to deposit our bags at the luggage area for 4Y (not bad for 2 bags) & then we had to join a queue to go through a security check. My patting down consisted of the woman feeling one of my front pockets, which I think was much the same for all the women, but the queue that Geoff was in, the guy was giving all the guys a full on pat down, front & back. My security check 1 min, with a queue, Geoff’s 13 minutes, with a queue. The view from the top is supposed to be quite nice, but I am not sure when you would see it, we were just above the square (Tiananmen Square) & we couldn’t even see all of it. Oh, we didn’t see Mao in state, the memorial hall is closed Mondays.

It started to rain as we headed to The Temple of Heaven & the rain never really let up for the rest of the day. The Temple of Heaven was actually quite nice, we weren’t too sure what it would be like, but it was quite nice. Very quirky in a way because all of the temples are circular. It took us about 4 hours to look around & we didn’t look at everything. We bought a through ticket 35Y ea + a Guide to the temple of Heaven 10Y (only got one). The guide is basically just a big map & some blurbs about the buildings + some convoluted explanation about the area. It’s quite nice really, would be nice to frame actually.

After all that we headed back to our hotel, stopping on the way to get some food for dinner - WOW, what an experience that turned out to be. I might have to do a totally new post for that one.