It hit me as I was finishing up my Rou Jia Mo. This was our last evening in Xi'an. Our three days here had been packed with activity and it's easy to get into that "ok, what's next, let's get going" mode, but everything must come to an end and we were ready to move on...almost.
The Missus really wanted another (our third) shot at the Guan Tang Baozi from Jia San and knowing we'd probably not be back this way again, who was I to deny Her the pleasure of those wonderful, steaming, soup filled, baozi?
As we headed back to our hotel it started raining pretty hard, like cats and dogs hard. We looked for a place to take a break and noticed this little shop.
So we paused and had a snack....a really cheap snack....a well, not so great version Rou Jia Mo, which was only 1.5 RMB, think 20 cents.
And it tasted every bit like a 20 cent sandwich........
We managed to make it back to the hotel, dodging raindrops, had a nice shower followed by a short nap. It was still raining pretty hard when we awoke, so we decided to head across the street to this restaurant for a light dinner.
This was a typical hotel restaurant, huge, with few customers. The sign said this place served Hunan food, but we really couldn't find anything that looked promising. The couple of folks in the place were all drinking, so we decided that perhaps a couple of beers would make for a nice getaway night treat. So we ordered some peanuts.....out came a humongous bowl of peanuts, enough to feed five or six people!
Since we needed some beer to go with our peanuts we tried the Hans Red Wolf lager.....I found out it's made by Tsingtao. Just your usual Chinese lager, no big deal.
To go with our mega peanuts we ordered a couple of vegetable dishes, starting with Baihe (lily bulb) and Black Fungus.
This was probably the worst Baihe dish we had on the entire trip, there were a lot of brown spots on the lily bulb and the flavor was a bit off.
The Missus also ordered a mushroom dish...which was also unremarkable.....
So we didn't quite go out with a bang.....
That's ok. There are memories of Xi'an that remain firmly embedded in our minds from the vibrant Muslim Quarter.....
To the amazing Army of Terracotta Warriors.
Which is good for any number of lifetimes in my book.....
Thanks for reading!
What's next? Spain? :)
Posted by: Janfrederick | Wednesday, 05 October 2011 at 08:49 AM
too bad with all that food, glad the rest of your trip was good!
Posted by: kat | Thursday, 06 October 2011 at 12:23 AM
Hi Jan - Sorry to dissappoint, there's still more China, Turkey, Crete, Chicago, and Hawaii coming up.....
Hi Kat - We really enjoyed our time in Xi'an.
Posted by: Kirk | Thursday, 06 October 2011 at 06:40 AM