Beijing Hot Pot

Tonight my officemate, Song, insisted on taking us to the Wangfujing area for a traditional hot pot dinner -- a popular communal dish where diners order raw vegetables and thinly sliced raw meats to cook in a boiling pot in the middle of the table. Once your items are cooked, you fish them out with your chopsticks and dunk them into a sauce before eating. A tasty and entertaining dinner. I borrowed the picture below from Guillermo's blog (Feel free to visit his blog from time to time for an alternate view and his stories/pictures), and you can see the hot pot (and steam) in the middle of the table, along with a nice plate of raw beef, which I am holding up for the camera.



Song, my office mate, is also a student intern, and she has been wonderful all week -- helping translate for me and brining me treats to work. Sadly though, today was her last day at work and she returns to her University outside of Beijing on Sunday. Below is a picture of us in the middle of the main drag in Wangfujing -- a huge street completely closed off and for pedestrians only. The whole area is incredibly chic, with tons of high-end retailers and bright flashing lights.



This area also has a very popular collection of street food vendors who sell a wonderful array of food on sticks. For the most part, the items on sticks are not for vegetarians or the faint of heart. Among the things I saw available were: scorpions, crawdads, squid, starfish, livers (unknown origin), centipedes, bugs, and fresh or candied fruit. Song told me that she thinks "the only thing we (Chinese people) won't eat are other humans." We stuck to the candied fruit for now (we *had* just eaten), but I hear the scorpion is mostly just a crunchy outside shell, so maybe later.


Guillermo lining up for the delicacies






There is also a gorgeous cathedral along this street, which I was not expecting, but despite the rift between the Chinese Catholic Church and the Vatican caused by the government's insistence on controlling the church and ongoing religious oppression in general, there are an estimated 15 to 20 million Catholics in China. (Just finding and reading that article required a virtual private network (VPN) connection to UCLA and an anonymizer to circumvent the web filters here, so despite many of the apparent signs of change and a movement towards a capitalist system, certain things are still very much controlled by the state.)