Food: Initial Reactions

List of foods eaten in first 24 hours in Beijing:
Dog crepe, Shark fin soup, Peking duck, lots of dumplings, mystery curry, Starbucks coffee and muffin, two Granola bars

Quick story about the dog crepe:
My first night in Beijing I took a taxi to a “Snack Street” where supposedly locals go to eat lamb kebabs and similar food. It turns out that the taxi actually took me to a touristy night market, not the one I tried to go to. But anyways, at one of the stands there was a sign that had in English “mutton” next to this crepe/pancake thing. Even though a lot of the stuff being served were cockroaches, scorpions, and other insects, mutton seemed very reasonable since I was looking for lamb kebabs. I ate about half of my crepe thing and threw it away because it was not very good. Then I see a sign at a different stall that says in English “Mutton (dog leg)”. Not very good news. Sure enough, I go back to the stand I ate at and below the word mutton it says dog leg. Awesome.

Update from Monday:
The developers took me out to dinner last night. We went to a restaurant that served food from northeast China. None of it was that great, but we did order both pig ears and spicy goat. The goat was quite good, tasted disturbingly like tacos. The pig ears looked too much like pig ears to be good.

Even considering the restaurant last night, Shanghai is much more Western than Beijing. There are two 24 hour McDonald’s on my walk home from work. There is also a Dairy Queen, a Starbucks, and a few KFC’s (very popular in China – over 1000 locations). But I have only caved in and gotten western food for breakfasts (not counting ice cream) because Chinese breakfasts are gross.