9 days in China and no rice!

Well, almost no rice. We had rice porridge the night we arrived in Beijing (Bernie's came with liver!), fried rice as part of our breakfast once at the Mao'er Hutong B&B, and a casserole of rice with preserved duck leg and spare ribs. But absolutely no white steamed rice, and we didn't see many Chinese people eating rice either. I guess that's northern China--they like dumplings and fried breads instead.
There's lots of stalls that sell crazy food to tourists both Chinese and international, like seahorses and silkworm larvae, but we weren't into that gimmicky stuff. Stefan enjoyed some squid on a stick though!
And we went to a restaurant in Shenyang in northeast China (aka Manchuria). No English menu, no pictures on the menu, we smiled and pointed to our menu and to the other tables and to the waitress and asked her to pick for us. She chose three dishes and they came out one by one: a small plate of cold sliced green vegetable, a large plate of diced silken tofu swimming in butter. And finally a huge bowl with a large fish swimming in a clear liquid. Soup? No, when she skimmed off the dried red chili peppers covering the entire top of the bowl we saw that the fish was in a gallon or so of bubbling hot oil sprinkled with mouth-numbing Szechuan peppercorns
People say that real Chinese food isn't as greasy or salty as what we get in the US, but they're wrong!
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