beijing, china, part III, the great wall

One of the reasons I don't talk much about the food in China is that most of the time, there's not much to talk about. It's there, and we eat it, and it's not revelatory or mind-blowing or delicious. But picking up the manners in China was sort of a different story, especially for us tour people, since we were so used to our Cantonese/American habits. For example, we learned the following:

• Each dish needs to have its own pair of chopsticks, which are shared communally. After you pick up your food and put it on your bowl or plate, you switch back to your own individual pair of chopsticks. In San Francisco, we would just use our own chopsticks to grab food, and just make sure you hadn't touched other people's food with it.
• In China, you need to ask the waiter/waitress to refill the teapot. In San Francisco, you just move the lid off the cover, and a waitperson will come by to refill it.
• Soup for some reason comes near the end of the meal, instead of the beginning.
• Watermelon is always dessert. I can't tell you how sick of watermelon we all were by the end of the trip.
  

We had various dumplings, which Beijing is known for, for lunch the previous day. They were all right - but everything ended up tasting the same to me. We had Peking duck for dinner that night, but it was a bit of a disappointment. The duck was dry and not juicy at all. At least the skin was crispy. Our tour buddies told us that they considered the Peking duck in the Bay Area far superior to the ones you got in China. So that is something we'll have to look into.

( Read more for day 3 )

Next stop: Nanjing.