Click on images below to enlarge:
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| One corner of the Forbidden City / Imperial Palace (taken using high zoom
-- no, I didn't walk down that far!). Notice the defensive tower and
walls, and the (frozen) moat.
| Now looking north from Wanchun Pavilion.
| A panoramic movie of the same scene, starting looking west toward Beihai
Park then swinging north before ending looking east. You can also see a
lot of Beijing in this video.
| The path from Wanchun Pavilion to Jifang Pavilion.
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| A sample of a part of Jingshan Park not on the hill. (I took this from
the west entrance as we left.)
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| Lunch
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Zha jiang mian. A common Northern Chinese dish, sometimes called
Beijing-style noodles, made from fermented bean paste. I thought it was
decent, maybe good, and pleasantly less stewy/less saucy than when I had
the dish in the states.
It's pretty; I'll almost give this picture
an excellent. Or did I?
Incidentally, this restaurant is at
the corner of Zhishanmen Street and Jingshan W. Street.)
| An ugly but delicious dish: jing1 jiang4 rou4 si1. Roughly translated,
Jing (common abbreviation of Beijing) sauce meat shreds. This was a dish
of sweet strips of pork that we wrapped with chives into a roll. (You can
see the chives underneath the meat.) The things that look like napkins
are not; they're either tofu paper or rice paper (I'm not sure which, and
I'm told it varies by part of the country; some parts don't even have
them) and they're the pancakes we used for wrapping. I knew the pork was
fatty but it was covered in sauce so I felt less bad about it / cared less
and simply enjoyed its great taste.
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| Beihai Park
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| Trees by the lake in Beihai Park. Something about the tone--the
coloring-- makes me give this an excellent.
| One end of the lake in Beihai Park. It's frozen.
| Definitely frozen: you can see kids on something like sleds on the ice,
and bigger kids on something like a bicycle.
| The temple (?) complex on the opposite side of the lake.
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| Looking back at Jingshan Park. The large building is the Wanchun
Pavilion.
| Stairs up to the White Pagoda.
| I like this bridge's design.
Incidentally, that woman looks kind of
shocked.
| Additional pleasant areas to stroll along the waterfront.
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| Stone steps up to a portal.
| A covered walkway along the lake.
| Paintings--they must be new, as they're all still so bright-on the ceiling
of the covered walkway. Notice that each painting is different. I'm told
most reflect stories from Chinese literature. Incidentally, today we saw
a lot of such paintings around both parks and, so some extent, in the
Forbidden City (especially in the jade exhibit).
| The plantings on the inside of the covered walkway.
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| Gala Company Dinner
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| The dinner menu at the gala company party. For completeness, I took a
picture of every dish.
| Cucumbers.
| Some form of ham and bamboo hearts?
| Mushrooms.
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| Spicy noodles. One of the two cold appetizers I liked. (The other is the
cucumber, which is hard to mess up.) Everything else wasn't done poorly;
the rest simply weren't dishes I enjoy.
| Sliced beef.
| The first hot dish of the meal: poached shrimp - standard, decent.
| Beef with straw mushrooms and kale. Chewy beef, but it tastes good. When
I returned to this dish later in the evening when it was cool, the
chewiness was gone but the flavor remained. :)
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| Hot and sour soup. Meh.
| Chicken with onions (and, supposedly, black bean sauce). Tastes like an
American stir-fry.
| Deep-fried smoked duck. Chewy. I can see the resemblance to How
Way Restaurant's duck but this is not in the
same league and I didn't end up finishing a piece.
| Steamed whole perch. It was nearly impossible to get the flesh away from
the bones, so I gave up on eating it.
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| Braised pork ribs. I really liked these; they're the characteristic deep
meaty taste in, for instance, at Jishi's
twice-cooked pork (though Jishi's pork was better).
| Cabbage with shiitaki mushrooms cooked in chicken broth. The cabbage was
unpleasantly stringy. I liked the mushrooms.
| Fried with rice with Chinese barbecue pork. Something about this dish
appealed to me much more than most fried rices I've been served in
Shanghai. I went back for it again and again.
| Fruit: dragonfruit, watermelon, oranges, and pineapple, and ... the orange
things that look like cherry tomatoes are kumquats.
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