more pictures

First, here are some pictures of food...



This guy is making noodles at the restuarant Aiyi where treated Hannah and me to Beijing kaoya (Peking duck). First, he grabs and stretches out the dough from the metal bowl on the right. He simultaneously pulls and forms the noodle from the dough. As he pulls the string out, he throws it into the boiling vat. I think if the dough didn't run out, you could have one continuous noodle miles and miles long.

Here he's making another kind of noodle. He uses a metal knife to shave off thin strips off of the slab of dough.

Here is the Beijing kaoya. Mmmm =) You eat this by taking a flat round doughy skin (which is really similar to uncooked dumpling skin) and placing the strip of duck, onion, cucumber, and sweet sauce in it. Then you wrap it up like a burrito, and enjoy =)

And this is what I had for breakfast this morning. It's called "tong yoon" in Cantonese, which makes it ... "tang yuen" in Mandarin? Whatever their proper name is, they are starchy glutineous balls of delight. These balls are prepared by boiling and are consist of gooey fillings. I've only tasted the sesame filling before in the States, but this morning there were a whole plethora of fillings, as you can tell from the different colors. All unidentifiable to me, except for the sesame and peanut filling.

And here are more pictures from last weekend when Andy, Blake and Hannah visited.

When we reached the top of Great Wall (after 500 steps of near 60-degree ascension), we had a photoshoot because Blake had brought his tripod. We were able to pose in many creative ways. Here we're emulating the "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" phrase, but since we had a fourth person, Hannah became "smell no evil."

This is at the Temple of Heaven, which serves as both a historical site (where the emperors used to come to worship heaven) and a public park. At the public park section, we watched these old people throw soft, cloth loops at each other. But instead of catching it with their hands, they'd catch it with their heads so the loops would end up around their necks! Since Andy was the only foreign-looking person around, they beckoned him to join them in their festivities. Here is a cool picture of him throwing the loop. At first he threw it too low, but he learned quickly after an old lady showed him how to do it (see picture in two posts ago). He also showed an aptitude for catching it with his head. Hannah told me that the crowds around us were exclaiming to each other about what a smart foreigner he was =P

This is my favorite picture of Hannah, which was taken at the Forbidden City. We just came out of the bathroom, I think. She was still exactly the same as I remembered her - kooky, child-like, making the same cartoon-sounding exclamations. =)