China recap: Lunches and Dinners

A few pictures of meals in China, or foods that we saw.  Lots of times for dinners, like the one in the first picture below, we'd order a ton of food (and beer) so we could try a lot of different things.  The food was really cheap! 

Dinner in Beijing: 


An odd menu option...

Food on the street for sale: 

 

Figs!  Something we always eat when we're in Italy, that we happily found in Hangzhou! 

So true!  We foudn we loved, loved, loved hotpot: 

Haagen Daas ice cream in Hangzhou, so much better than any Chinese ice cream I tried: 

One of the weirdest things we ate.  It was some kind of candied dried fruit: 

 

 

We had pizza twice in China.  I can take my husband out of Italy, but I can't take Italy out of him...  The first pizza pic was in Beijing, a restaurant owned by two Italian brothers, young guys that we talked to for a long time in Italian.  They described their decision to open a pizzeria in China as being based on "fertile earth".  Lots of money to be made in China for sure! 

 

Pizza in Shanghai at one of the restaurants right by the Ritz Carlton: 

More street food: 

Hot pot in Chongqing, note all the empty beer bottles (and those are huge bottles!).  It was very spicy! 

A hotpot restaurant before meal time: 

Hubby was thrilled to find Segafreddo in China.  I had tea: 

Street food: 

Hmm, must taste?  I'd say not: 

Making dumplings: 

Mmm, another hotpot picture! 

Eating on low stools while hunched over is definitely very different, but very common there, particularly along the sidewalks: 

This was a massive dinner in Chongqing that was so good! 

These were boiled peanuts and veggies: 

Fried zucchini at the pizza place in Shanghai: 

A regional variation of the hamburger, found outside Xi'an (I didn't eat it): 

No climate controlled storage for meat for sale: 

Something like a sweet potato I bought: 

I thought bubble tea was Taiwanese, but we found it in Beijing: 

Chongqing beer (we drank a lot because we ate so much spicy hot pot there): 

Another hotpot picture for you...

I wish I had a picture to show the scale.  Each of these carrots was about the size of my husband's foot, and he has huge feet.  They were just bagged up at the back of a restaurant: 

Tofu on the street in Xian: 

Another morning espresso, this time I had one too: 

Cafeteria-style lunch on day -- maybe in Yichang I think? 

Definitely the weirdest food on the trip.  Some kind of soup with unknown meat that hubby ended up with in Beijing at a tiny little place on our way to the Temple of Heaven where we had lots of trouble communicating. 

Definitely in Yichang, she was making something a bit like crepes, but crispier, very good: 

 

I think some of the following posts from various cities may show some of the food too, but those are definitely the highlights.