Our Favorite Hutong

On Thursday night, after Mike's run-in with the local po-po, he and I headed out to our favorite Chinese-only hutong for some Beijing style hot-pot and meat grilling. It's about 5 stops east on the 10 line, the subway stop is called Mudanyuan. The alleyway is bigger than your average hutong, it's always crowded with vendors, restaurant stalls, taxis, deliveries, trucks, etc. It's a really interesting neighborhood, and of course, you know how we love that it's totally white-man free.

We started out with a very typical Beijing type restaurant: communal hot pot. Basically you all sit around large burbling pots of a sort of soy/broth based thing with many, many sticks in the pot. You grab what you want from the pot and at the end they count up the sticks that you have finished off. Most of the stuff was amazingly tofu or veggie based; a lot of different kinds of tofu, noodles, mushrooms, etc. My favorites were those skinny white mushrooms that Japanese love that go in hot pot all the time, vermicelli noodles, fresh greens, and wood ear mushrooms. We also had plenty of beer. We chatted with the proprietor a bit, he asked where we were from (Beijingers always ask "what country are you from?" even though it seems perfectly obvious to us that we are American. Probably because there are so many whiteys in Beijing...). We told him that our mom is Chinese (to make matters easy, Mike and I just say we are related, big brother and little sister). He complimented our Chinese, and we used the classic Asian deflect a compliment by playing it down. We told him our mom is from Guangdong province and he asked if we knew any Guangdonghua (Cantonese). I joked that all I knew was fai di sic la, which means "Hurry up and eat!" My performance was much appreciated.

After dropping a whole 20 kuai at the communal hot pot place, we hit up an "everything on a stick grill" place, which is also very Beijing. We sat outside, since the evening weather has finally gotten really pleasant. We had a great time just taking photos (subtly) of people, eating, drinking, etc. The chicken hearts were delicious!

We made it back on one of the last trains, and I rolled into bed. I woke up when Jessica came home from Passover Seder, which turned into clubbing (very holy, eh? We had a good laugh over it!). Overall it seems that Thursdays always turn into great days, probably to make up for the pain of having Accounting quizzes in the morning.