Summer Palace

Since I’ve been here, I’ve wanted to try dim sum (pronounced dian xin). Dim Sum is where people push carts around with food and you pick which foods you want off of that cart. In China, dim sum  is a little different because they don’t have the carts. We went to a really big restaurant that was four stories high. We sat on the third floor because the first floor didn’t have tables for four, the second floor was having a wedding party, but the third floor was perfect. We were seated in a private room with walls on three sides and a curtain (that stayed opened) on the other. We had piles and piles of different kinds of dumplings. Some were pan fried, some deep fried, and some steamed.  We ate all dumplings except for one order of sticky rice. It was delicious and I want to go back before we leave.

Once we left the restaurant, we got a taxi to the Summer Palace. The Summer Palace is the grounds of the old emperor’s mother. It’s big and beautiful with a big lake, lots of interesting buildings, like a big temple, a theater, and a naval training center. When the emperor’s mother lived there, no one could come on the grounds unless she invited them.  At the Summer Palace there were so many rocky hills and I loved climbing them. I would always get to the very top. On the huge lake, there were hundreds of boats. We rented one of the boats where two people pedal to make it go. We all switched on and off. My favorite part was going to the very front point of the boat and seeing the mountains and things from the view of the boat. We all had a great time. We spent about 6 hours wandering around the grounds and we didn’t even see everything.

Later at night, we went to a roast duck restaurant for dinner again. Can you guess what we had? That’s right, the roast duck. They bring out the whole duck and carve it up right in front of you. Then they serve it with pancakes that you add some sauce and wrap the duck meat up and eat with your fingers. They serve every part of the duck. My mom ate the brains. My dad dared my brother and me to eat the duck tongue. I was pretty nervous, but we both ate a bight and it wasn’t bad at all. I didn’t eat the whole thing though. While you are eating the carved up duck, they take the duck bones to the kitchen and boil them to make a broth. We might have to have roast duck one more time before we leave.

This entry was posted on 26. April 2008 at 23:11 and is filed under China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.