Use of Language
I struggled to retain a few words of Chinese (I was not diligent in my preparations...). And then, our guides, who changed nearly each day as we traveled from city to city, wanted to teach us a few words of their dialect, or the local dialect. This was beyond my capability! I would have loved to learn some more language, but my brain just couldn't hold any more...
Trip Photos
I took over 1,000 photos on the trip, all from my cell phone, so that you can manage your expectations about quality (though some of them are quite good).
I have sent a link to these photos on the web to all the travelers on the trip. I haven't linked to them here, out of some concern about your privacy. Since my photos are very informal, I didn't want to assume it would be OK to make them available to readers of this blog. If you want access to them, I suggest you contact one of the travelers you know, or myself, and ask for the link.
Need for Guides
It was apparent to me that I would have been in sad shape without a Chinese speaking guide. I could grasp only a few words of the language, and I could read nothing in Chinese. And there was little written material or signage in English, anywhere. An occasional street sign was in English. Menus, hotel A/C controls, museum signage, were almost entirely in Chinese. It was a humbling feeling.
Rent a CAR? No way!
I would never attempt to drive in this country, even if I could rent a car (and I don't think I could..)
The Food - Plentiful, unusual, then becoming routine.
We were well fed. The hotel breakfast buffets were generous, while often having foods not familiar to us. Pastries were usually mediocre by my standards. No coffee was served anywhere. Hot water, warm milk, or hot tea were the drinks.
ROUND TABLES
The luncheons and dinners were almost always at a
round table seating about 8 people, with a large Lazy Susan (revolving platform) in the middle. We almost always had a 1 liter bottle or two of beer with the meals (included in the tour package) to be shared among the 8 of us at each table.
AMPLE
The food was always ample, or more so. I don't think we ever ate it all. Chicken and pork with rice were common in the East, with more mutton and noodles appearing as we moved west into more Muslim populated areas.. Steamed or fried whole fish were occasional treats, served whole, and we picked off a few bites of meat as the table rotated.
WHAT IS IT?
When we asked what something unidentifiable to us was, we sometimes got an answer, but the most frequent answer we got from Shudong was: "Remember, Chinese people eat everything that flies except airplanes, and everything with four legs except tables." He said this enough times, that I began to take him seriously.
YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW...
There was discussion about the quality of rat meat, and that the secret was to get rats who ate from good food sources (avoid sewer rats!) So did we eat rat meat? I don't know.
Once we were served a stir fried meat that looked a lot like chicken, if the chicken had been laid on a cutting board and chopped into bite sized pieces from the whole chicken. Every bite had bone in it, that you just ate around. I'm not at all sure it WAS chicken.
I think most of us just adopted this rule of thumb: If you see something you don't recognize, try it. If you like it, eat more. If you don't like it, don't eat more. Simple enough...
WATER?
Because of unsafe water, we did not eat any fresh vegetables. We only ate fruit that we could wash ourselves in known safe water (e.g. bottled).
Just about every lunch and dinner meal included a hot, broth like soup. Usually just vegetable broth.
Food was delivered throughout the meal. More came as we ate. Plates of food were not replenished. When an item was gone, that was all. But we had lots of choices. I would estimate that there were at least 8 or 10 choices of dishes at each meal.
The delivery of
watermelon chunks told us that we now had all the food - it is the universal desert.
Tummy Distress?
Our very first guide in Beijing told us that her experience was that most touristas like us would get some minor stomach distress at about day 7 to 9 of the trip, She did not know why this is true, but that was her experience.
Well, she was correct. I would say that at least two-thirds of us did experience some distress, myself included, at about that point in the trip. For most of us, it slowed us down a day or two. For a few, they stayed back at the hotel for the day. I skipped food for a day, and slept through one evenings activity and meal.
I will note that at about this time, our Uigyr guide Noor, in Urumqi, bought us all a fried treat from a street vendor, which he wanted us to have a chance to try. The next day was when most of us had some distress. Was it from the fried treat? We'll never know. But the timing is certainly suspicious.
