Yummy Chinese food

I have to start out by saying that I really do love Chinese food, my favorite!  I was warned by many people about the food in China and that it is not the same, which I now agree with, but it is still great food and I really did love it!  The above picture was taken by Lynar on a previous trip.  This is how the table is set up at a traditional Chinese restaurant!

My first day in China we went to breakfast at the hotel.  Being a little nervous about the food from what I had heard, I ate a lot of breakfast.  It was a buffet that had a lot of food options...although the first line of food that I saw was noodles, rice, vegetables, and soup.  I was worried until I saw that there was a chef making omlet's fresh and you could pick your ingredients.  Awesome!  I love Omlets!  Come to find out after I got a few things, they had a ton more options.  Lots of fresh bread that was wonderful!  We ate up!   All our breakfasts had great food, but always with those same noodles, and steamed vegetables.  My favorite places had steamed sugar snap peas!  Yum!

Lynar then went to work and I went to bed.  Couple of hours later, Lynar picks me up and we went to Mission Hills Golf Course.  This is the golf course that the World Cup will be played on Thanksgiving Day!  It was so beautiful there.  I had no idea there were such pretty mountains in south China.  It was so green and pretty. 

We got a tour of the golf course and then went into a private room with a round table.  In the middle of the table was a turn table that food was put on so you could spin it so the food could reach everyone!  Something that we need to have!  What a fabulous idea.  No one has to pass the food, just turn the table!  Two dishes of food was brought out and everyone was given small dessert plates and bowls.  Oh, tea was served at every meal.  We don't drink tea, but most of the people were used to it that we were with.  What you would do is take a bite or two of each dish.  Not knowing that more food was coming, I probably started out taking too much thinking that there was no way these few bites would fill me up.  When those dishes were 1/2 gone, they brought out a duck with the head on it.  The server cut it up right in front of us and put some pieces in a tortilla looking thing, then that went on the turn table.  We ate that up, then they brought out something else.  We ate up, then more came.  By this time I was getting quite full, but it just kept coming.  About every 5-10 minutes more food would come.  Most all meals ended in fruit....I caught onto that about the 3-4th meal there.  I think about 8 different dishes came out.  We were all so full by the time the fruit came...but the fruit was so good.  This is how most of our meals were in China.  Lots of food all the time!  Seems like meals would take 2 hours a piece.

I learned to use chop sticks pretty good.  The first few meals the waiter would bring me and only me a fork and a knife.  I guess I looked pretty bad at first! 

The Chinese like their food fresh.  My very favorite was some cucumbers that they said was flown in from Northern China every day.  It was the best cucumbers I've had ever!  They had a semi-spicy sauce that you could dip them in that was wonderful as well. 

This is a picture of one of our last meals in China.  It's hard to tell what it is with all the sauce, but it's a fish with it's head, tail, and fins still on.  Moments before this was brought out, the waiter came out to our table with a bucket and in the bucket was a fish that was very much alive.  The waiter just wanted to make sure that this was the right fish that we wanted.  Never seen that before!  We ate a lot of good fish!  This one tasted really good. 

The Chinese keep the head on everything.  These ducks were hanging in a fast food window.  The one on the right looked like the one we ate at our first meal.  They seem to eat a lot of duck.