Fermented tofu and oat congee - I’ve acquired a taste for fermented tofu here. If you consider tofu to be Chinese cheese, then this would be the blue cheese of China. Every morning at the Microsoft cafeteria they have this tasteless congee (an unsalted, unflavored soup made from rice, corn or oats and water). Not all congee is tasteless (see Macau congee I had) but this one is. However, because it is unflavored it goes very well with the fermented tofu. For the first couple of weeks here, I didn’t try the fermented tofu, it’s bloody red and mushy, it looks intense like its taste. I looked at it every morning but I didn’t know what it was and luckily I didn’t try it. I’m saying luckily because probably I would not like it if I did. It’s very flavorful and you’re supposed to take tiny bits. Later my colleagues have told me stories where they’ve tried the entire piece at once and never had it again :-) Then one day I ate with somebody from the research team and he explained me what it was and that it’s used as a condiment for the congee. So next morning I tried it, and didn’t like it. For some reason, I tried it again a few more times, and then I started to enjoy it. Now I am upset if they don’t have it in the morning.

Street food - meat skewers with lots of spices. The street food is pretty good, and although the vendors don’t look clean, I’ve been surprised at how careful they are to not mix the money and the food. It sounds basic but it has happened to me before in the States to see vendor take the money with plastic glove on and then handle the food with the same glove. Not here, they always use the chopsticks to handle the food or there is a second person handling the finances.

Melon on a stick - yummy :) .. Summer is gone and I miss this.

Sichuan style sausage with Sichuan numbing peppers, lots of them. You’ve probably didn’t have this kind of peppers in US, it was illegal to import them until 2005. They are very spicy and create this tingly, numbing sensation, it almost reminds me of dentist anesthesia (you can tell I’ve gone too often to the dentist). I really enjoyed meat skewers with Sichuan pepper condiment, but this dish was too much for me. I think I barely ate one 3rd of the dish, my forehead was transpiring, my mouth was numb and somehow I could still feel the spiciness of the peppers. I would probably enjoy a milder version of this, but I think my order had too many peppers (stars). I didn’t bother to ask for a box.

Ramen restaurant - Japanese noodles, very good

Ramen restaurant - rice with eel

There’s a DIY fast food here close to Carrefour where you can select your ingredients, and then hand them over to the cook. I probably picked: sea weed, bok choy, mushrooms, cabbage, all sorts of tofu and fish based dumplings, noodles and a sesame sauce. It’s really good, one of my favorite foods here. This picture was from one of my first dinners there when I didn’t quite manage to get the vegetables quantity right, since then I’ve become an expert.  Last time I finally managed to eat the noodles with the chopsticks without staining my t-shirt :-)

Mongolian grill - very good, I think I’ll have this again before I leave

Bellagio restaurant - Beef Chow Mein - good food, this dish was actually very similar to some dishes I’ve had in the States

Cantonese style beef - My colleague Bin was very nice and took me on a Beijing tour this last weekend. We went to art area Road 798, and to Yuan Ming Yuan, we had a really nice time, I’ll blog about that separately next time. We stopped for lunch at a Cantonese style restaurant, this dish and the soup were really good. 

Whole lamb at 99 Yurts restaurant - I saved the best for last. My colleague Cory and his wife Haiyan, who I cannot thank enough, have been showing me the interesting places around Beijing. One of these places is the 99 Yurts restaurant, I definitively recommend trying it. You can rent a tent (yurt) and buy a whole lamb like the one above, it’s delicious. The setting is probably perfect for parties or birthdays, the occasion this time was Cory’s friend visiting from Hong Kong. 

Last weekend I went to Hong Kong.

My Marco Polo fellow Eoin had plans to go to Hong Kong over the course of the last weekend and I decided to join him on the trip. Hong Kong is only 3 hours away from Beijing and it’s definitively worth the trip.

My first impression was one of awe at the engineering marvels that are all around. I did see the Discovery documentary about the new Hong Kong International Airport which was built on a large artificial island, formed by leveling two adjacent islands and reclaiming a large part of the adjacent seabed however I was unaware of the scale of everything else. Outstanding bridges and tunnels are everywhere, an impressive bridge will be constructed between Hong Kong and Macau, huge cranes, and large cargo containers, the 7,650 skyscrapers, all of these make for a very impressive engineering landscape; unless you see it it’s hard to understand the scale of it. 

Given the engineering marvels that I mentioned, the wealth  should not come as a surprise, the entire city is a huge open air luxury mall, and a lot of Chinese come from mainland China to Hong Kong to do their shopping here. I almost bought a 500 USD silk scarf, which I mistakenly thought was $50 :-)

There is a lot to see and in the two days we stayed there we barely scratched the surface. We stayed at Cosmo hotel close to downtown, so we were able to walk a little bit through the city. During the day we took two different bus tours, one inside the city and one that took us to Victoria Peak. At night we took the Star Ferry to Tsim Sha Tsui and back, that allowed us to take a good look at the city skyline. 

Eoin and me after a long walk through the city. Eoin is a Senior Developer in Microsoft Excel and his Marco Polo timeline roughly matches mine. 

I took some pictures but I was really disappointed by the quality of my pictures, so I included a few pictures from Wikipedia below.

Hong Kong Skyline Panorama - full image

Hong Kong view from Victoria peak

The ride from Victoria Peak back to the city was terrible, I would compare it to a roller-coaster. It didn’t help that the night before Eoin and I had a little Irish - Romanian beer drinking competition (Ireland won), luckily me and my lunch made it safely back to the sea level.

Almost everyone speaks excellent English in Hong Kong, and the culture is more Western, things are milder, somewhere between China and the west. In many ways Hong Kong could be a sneak peak into China’s future, although I believe that communism in China, like in Romania, has left many scars that will take a long time to heal. 

Every year the Microsoft team in China has an offsite event to celebrate the year that passed, start the next year with style and boost the moral of the troops. Intentionally or not this event is in September which aligns very nicely with the Microsoft review period. I was very lucky to have my Marco Polo rotation overlap with this event and I was invited as well. I really felt lucky to be part of this, the event this year was held in Guilin and it will most likely be the highlight of my trip to China. We left for Guilin on Wednesday August 31st, my birthday. The flight was uneventful, and on approaching Guilin we could see the signature mountains from the air.

From the airport, most people went to the hotel for check-in. I went with the soccer team to play the traditional soccer game against one of the other Microsoft teams at the event. I played ok, even managed a goal-assist pass. In the end we lost 4-2, we had a nice comeback that was unfortunately short-lived. It was a very nice game that everyone enjoyed.

From the soccer field we went to the Guilin Lijiang Waterfall Hotel.

Guilin Lijiang Waterfall Hotel

The hotel was very nice. The elevators looked very familiar, it took me a while to figure out that they look like the plastic tubes that carry money from the cashier to the safe. I’ve seen these tubes at Metro stores (like Costco) in Romania. They probably also look like gift boxes. The hotel has a water show similar to the one at Bellagio, Las Vegas, unfortunately the installation was undergoing some scheduled maintenance so we didn’t get to see the show.

Tourist street next to the hotel: restaurants and gift shops

After checking-in at hotel I went out with a few of my colleagues to celebrate my birthday.

Bin, Bo, Julie, Samson toasting at my birthday dinner

My first escargot

We had a lot of good food, hot pot with fish, escargot, eggplant, and beers. It was my first time that I had escargot, it was good, I probably had a little bit more than my fair share. Thank you guys for the nice evening!

The second day we had the Microsoft China conference. It was probably the best organized event I’ve seen at Microsoft, in fact the entire trip has been amazingly well organized. I’ve got used to exceptional organization in US, however I didn’t expect to see that matched and occasionally surpassed in China.

The team has prepared a movie ‘The Cloud’: all actors were colleagues from the office. It was the best movie I’ve seen at Microsoft, it was very very funny, and at the same time romantic, at the end of the movie the geek in all of us was touched. Honestly, my eyes were watery at the end of the movie. The movie was inspired from Terminator but it had some romantic and comical twists that made it more interesting than the original. 

From conference we went to the Gudong Waterfall where we had a team building event. We climbed and hiked over multiple cascades and ponds from the bottom of the mountain to the springs at the top. The ponds were so clean and the water so warm that everyone could barely refrain from jumping in the water. No swimming allowed signs were everywhere.

We gave up our shoes and instead we put on something that looked like the original flip-flop shoes, flip-flops made from twisted dry grasses. It took me a while to figure out how I’m supposed to wear them but once I got that nailed down, they were very comfortable and non-slippery.

In the evening we had a big team lunch at the Fulongxuan. The food was good, and the atmosphere was identical to that of a Romanian New Year’s party: everyone was toasting everyone. When I say toasting, I mean  ’Gun bai’-ing, meaning bottoms up. Every manager ‘gun-bai’s his directs with a little bit of beer, and they return the favor before the end of the night. I didn’t know about this, but apparently about 20% of Chinese are actually allergic to alcohol, and 10% are violently allergic to alcohol.

Elber, Warren and me

Girl dancing at Fulongxuan 

On 3rd day we went on the Xingping river to see the main attraction of Guilin. Guilin is very well known for the surreal and strangely shaped mountains.

One of the traditional ways of catching fish was by using cormorants. The bird would catch the fish and then the owner would recover the fish from the bird. Now they are used more for tourism. A picture with the cormorants is 2 RMB.

Guilin - Li River boat trip from Adrian Hamza on Vimeo.

The mountains are not very tall, but they’ve been rounded and shaped into strange forms by wind and water erosion. The mountains look surreal and they are the subject of many chinese paintings; they are also featured on the 20 RMB Chinese banknote. 

Me and Bob Bao at the approximate location of the 20RMB picture.

The trip on the river reminded me of the Iron Gates close to my home town, the river is smaller but the mountains in Guilin are however a lot more interesting.

After the Xinping river trip we went to the Silver Cave and then shopping on the Yanshuo West Street.

The most impressive part of the Silver Cave was the reflection of stalactites and stalagmites into the small water ponds. I would sit there for a few good seconds trying to distinguish between deep ravines and ponds that reflected the stalactites and made them look like stalagmites.  The illusion was almost perfect.

I didn’t buy any souvenirs on Yanshuo West Street but I did try some grilled spicy tofu from street vendors. You can buy 2 for 3 RMBs, the consistency is identical to Creme Brulee, but instead of being a sweet desert, it’s actually a spicy dish.

From there we went to see the ‘Impressions of Sanjie Liu’ show. The show was my favorite part of the entire trip. The beautiful scenery and music, and the entire performance makes for a very touching show. It is directed by the famous movie director Zhang Yimou which was involved in the organization of the Beijing 2008 Olympics ceremonies and this show is at an Olympic scale as well. I think there were easily several hundred people involved in the visible part of the performance.

Guilin - Impression of Sanjie Liu from Adrian Hamza on Vimeo.

Here’s a short clip from the ‘Impression of Sanjie Liu’ show on Taohua river. The show is inspired by a famous Chinese movie Sanjie Liu, you can read a little bit about the show here travelchinaguide.com/​attraction/​guangxi/​yangshuo/​impression-sanjieliu.htm and hopefully more videos here wn.com/​Impressions_of_Sanjie_Liu 

It’s been a while since I posted about food, so here’s one more post on this subject.

Our new favorite restaurant at the Yonghegong subway station and close to Lama Temple. It’s open 24x7 and in the evening people wait outside in order to have dinner there. It’s very well organized, they give you a ticket and have two waiting lines, one for small tables/groups one for large tables/groups. While waiting they serve tea and sun flower seeds outside :-) We really enjoyed the dim sum there. They very courteous and signaled us to come inside when our turn came, we wouldn’t have known that they were calling our number otherwise.

Me and the kids waiting outside. The kids befriended a Chinese girl and then rearranged the chairs outside. They managed to keep all restaurant employees at bay when they tried to take back the chairs :-)

Furniture detail

Egg drop soup for the kids and some meat and vegetable balls

Meatballs in the background, rice and chicken wrapped in Lotus leafs.

Stanca’s favorite, really good but the kids only ate the outside rice noodles.

Sometimes some of the best food comes from where you least expect it. When the family was still here we would walk quite a lot. One day we went for quite a long walk at the end of which I was exhausted and quite cranky. It was night, I was tired, having a cold, and the cars exhaust and the bad air didn’t make breathing any easier. I wasn’t in mood for any more walking to find a restaurant and I didn’t want to eat again at the Raffle City, so instead we went to this food court close to the Bus station at Dongzhimen. It didn’t look like a place where I would like to eat but I was tired so I just went with it, Stanca seemed interested. We ended up having some of the best food we tried in China and I would say healthy food, not greasy and it had lots of vegetables.

One of the excellent dishes we had at the food court. The green vegetable is not pepper, it’s probably shredded turnip. The meat is chicken, we had to find a translator to order it with chicken (not pork). 

The other very good dish we had at the food court, pork with fungus/mushroom and celery. Of course the kids didn’t eat the ‘green stuff’.

The Macau Taste restaurant in Sanlitun Village. I ate here when I went shopping for shoes. 

I have two colleagues from Macau, Eldon in Redmond and Samson in Beijing so I was really curios to see how the food was in Macau. I had some beef porridge that was really really good, I almost ordered a second portion. The papaya pudding was OK, probably bought from store, not bad but it wasn’t special.

The ‘original’ Diesel shoes I bought at the Silk Market in Sanlitun. First asking price specially for me: 650 yuan; I paid 200 yuan, probably a more fair price would have been 150 yuan. If you go to the Silk Market, any lady there selling something will negotiate with you in English, French and probably German; and if one doesn’t speak your language she will find somebody who does.

On August 31 the whole team, me included, is going to Guilin, probably one of the most beautiful places in China, coincidentally August 31 is also my birthday. 

My wife and kids are back to Bellevue, and this is a little bit bitter sweet. I’m glad that they got home safely and that my wife or somebody else didn’t jump out of the plane during the 12 hours flight. If you’ve traveled with kids, you probably know what I mean. Or if your name is Bin and you got the unlucky chance of having the sit in front of my son on a 12 hours flight, you also know what I mean :-) Bin is my colleague PM and he had the sit in front of my son on our flight to Beijing. At the time I didn’t know him and he didn’t know me either. When we got introduced the second day we didn’t realize we were on the same flight the day before, or he was too polite to mention it. Only two weeks later when my family visited at work, he recognized my son and we put two and two together … Tudor made a strong impression on him .. literally, but Bin was really nice and joked about it.

It feels like a really long time since the last blog post. Since then we’ve been to three nice parks: Temple of Earth, Temple of Sun and Jingshan Park; we also passed again through Tiananmen Square but this time at night; our favorite restaurant has fallen into disgrace; a new favorite has emerged; my daughter has broken a chair in a restaurant and formatted my phone; and everyone is back to US except me. A lot to write about, I’ll probably split this into two posts.

Picture taken at the top of the Ritan park (Temple of Sun park). The park is close to the ‘Russia town’ in Beijing :-) … we looked really hard but couldn’t find where China town was ;-) I never spoke Russian but I knew the cyrillic characters and I could read, I discovered I can’t anymore. A Russian couple took this picture of us, we chatted a little bit about their vacation experience on a Chinese island in the south which they enjoyed. There are a lot of rides for kids in the park and the view at the top is really nice. We took the bus to the park, a lot simpler, there are no stairs to carry the stroller. 

Me with the kids in Temple of Earth park (Ditan park), next to a Confucius statue. I wished I had his hair, and I think he wished he had a Windows 8 tablet or at least my Mango phone, those stone tablets seemed heavy. This park was only one subway station away from our hotel, too bad we found it only 1 week before my family left.

Forbidden city panorama and exit gate from the top of the Jingshan Park. 

Right down - the corner of the Forbidden city wall and moat, left top - the top of the Jingshan Park from where we took the previous picture.

Yesterday we went to our now favorite restaurant, Jing Zun Pecking Duck, for obviously Peking duck. It was good and the kids loved it, they probably had more than we did. On the way back we passed by a hair saloon. It was the 3rd time I passed by it, and this time I mustered the courage to get a hair cut.

My hair style is as simple as it gets: number 2 all over and still most of my experiences in US have been negative. The hair stylists cut the hair the same way Tudor, my 2 year old son draws: randomly and aggressively, resulting in a trashed paper/scalp. But I wasn’t afraid of this, I was worried a little bit about the language barrier, I suspected (correctly as I would find out) that number 2 haircut does not mean the same thing in China and US and I didn’t want to shave my head. 

So I went in and exhausted half of the conversation by saying nihao. Then I made the universal scissors action sign, like it wasn’t obvious while I was there. I refused the hair wash and went straight for the action. My kids and wife, they all aligned on the chairs by the wall, smiling silently like vultures on a branch waiting for the event to happen :-) … The hair dresser shown me the trimmer and I carefully selected the correctly sized extension. 

The hair dresser was good, very careful and meticulous, nothing to worry about. I was relieved that my worries were unfounded, and I smiled to my daughter when she complimented me on how good my hair cut looks. Taking advantage of the distraction, the hair dresser removed the extension and went in for the kill … cutting the hair on the sides reaallllyy short with the trimmer without the extension… I think I said … oh no… or … damn, and both me and the hair dresser froze looking at each other, while my wife was barely containing her smiles.

I saved face pretending nothing happened and signed for him to continue. At the end, I signaled to him to trim my eyebrows. He was still holding the trimmer in his hand and judging by his panicky look I realized he had no idea what I wanted. I imagined my self with my eyebrows shaven, maybe an eyeliner instead of eyebrows, giving a presentation to the managers on the planning for the next milestone. Almost too funny to pass on that opportunity :-) I signaled ‘nevermind’ and he thought it was a joke. I payed 30 RMB (I learned second day at work that regularly a buzz cut is 5RMB < 1 dollar), and exhausted the second part of the conversation with a ‘xièxiè’.

[edit] On demand, updating with mugshot

I actually don’t care that much about my hair style, and in the end it looked better than my intended hair cut. However, a colleague had a similarly funny experience here. He asked for a number 5 hair cut and then he learned it’s a lot shorter than number 5 in US.

Other than that, it’s worth mentioning that we saw the blue sky yesterday. It rained 2 nights in a row and the sky cleared up. I could see the mountains on the horizon in the morning. Beijing is beautiful, but it would be so much more beautiful if not for the smog.

Saturday we visited TianTan (The Temple of Heaven). The Temple of Heaven was built between 1406-1420 and it’s located in a 200+ hectares park, very beautiful and peaceful, even more so in the morning when we arrived. The temple was beautiful too but because of the rigorous Chinese rules that controlled how all these temples were built, for us it is actually becoming difficult to differentiate between them. They are all built around a square square :-), with with 4 buildings, one on each side. The main building faces the building through which you enter the square, the other two buildings are identical. There is symmetry everywhere, and every detail has its purpose. I’m sure there are probably entire books written on the traditional Chinese architecture rules.

Don’t let yourself be fooled by this picture, there were people everywhere, I’m not sure how it happened that we got such a clean picture with almost no people.

Open air gym in TianTan park. We thought this was a kids playground, it turned up it was an adults/retirees open air gym. You see the guy to right? He was moving with such an ease from one bar to another, just amazing. Take a look at the movie below, he was kind enough to do a do-over just for me to record him. This is actually one of the things that I like and admire the most about Chinese. They are very social, you see places like this one where old people meet, exercise, dance, sing, etc. Even at an old age, the still take good care of their body and soul, and that’s something that I think must be admired.

TianTan (Temple of Heaven) Park - Retiree ‘playground’ from Adrian Hamza on Vimeo.

Sunday we woke up and had breakfast at JustToast, I was longing for a french toast. Unfortunately, JustToast, was really just-toast and not a lot more. After that we took the subway 2 to Guloudajie station, and jaywalked through the HouHai neighbourhood and then up to the Jishuitan station. I’m really wish I had GPS recorded our itineraries, I think we walked at least 10 miles every weekend day.

HouHai pet store from Adrian Hamza on Vimeo.

The HouHai neighborhood is an area in Beijing with very narrow streets (hutongs), and some old traditional houses. Unfortunately, the area is not yet completely restored, there’s one street that gives you a good idea of what it should look like and that street is beautiful, but a lot of other streets still need work.

The pretiest hutong street

Many streets are not closed to traffic, so you must avoid cars and rickshaws that are passing by. We also walked on the Lotus lane, which is another narrow street around the lake with lots of restaurants.

This stroller has been amazing, I’m surprised it’s still lasting. Beijing and accessibility (as in wheelchair accessible) do not go hand in hand. There are accessibility signs in a lot of places but very few things are accessible by stroller/wheelchair. Trees and cars are blocking the walkways everywhere, ramps are rare. Temple of Heaven was an exception, it had good usable ramps, but everywhere else I had to unload the kids, pack it, carry it by hand, unpack it, loads the kids, then repeat.  There are wheelchair lifts in many places (subway) but they are all turned off and locked. I’m guessing they were added during the Olympics and then abandoned … it’s a pity. The elevators are either not present or they are hidden and no where to be found. So I’ve developed a routine, I can probably pack/unpack this stroller blindfolded in less than 30 seconds, I feel like a magician, people always look at me in admiration when I do my routine :-)

I happened to find some evidence of Ozan’s (my Dev Lead) secret Marco Polo adventure to Beijing :-) … he’s from Turkey in case it’s not obvious

… and also some electrical wiring/power meters installed by my coworker David :-)

The first few days here we’ve run into the beginner’s luck, we ate at some of the best restaurants and quite cheap, but the luck ran out. We also found the bad restaurants, and some of them quite expensive.

The bad restaurants tend to be quite bad: bad service, dirty and food that is too greasy and too sweet, McDonald’s seems healthy by comparison. The funny part about the service is that sometimes it seems like there are more waiters then customers and you still have to wait for the food. The food does not come all at once, and for some reason, the rice has always been the last to be brought to the table, so you often wait for the rice to come. The ‘service script’ is also different, you are not brought water automatically, you have to ask for it. It’s also customary to bring hot water, not cold water. At one restaurant, half of the fish in the tanks were dead floating, needless to say, we didn’t have fish there, our driver Paul took us there otherwise we would have eaten somewhere else.

There are good restaurants, but you have to know where they are. My colleagues Stephen, Eric, Michael and Hugh have all taken me to very good restaurants and some of the best restaurants we ate at were recommended to us by other people. The street noodles we had in Chaoyang park were really good. Our first or second dinner we had in Beijing was at a very good restaurant and we plan to return there (unfortunately I didn’t pay attention to the name) to have Peking duck. 

Microsoft cafeteria breakfast - pickled vegetables, soup and crepe with some greens

Microsoft cafeteria breakfast - pickled vegetables, some wheat/oatmeal/other grain soup, meat filled steamed buns, rolls with sweet bean filling

Microsoft kitchenette -3:30 snack, every day there’s a fruit snack in the afternoon (watermelon, melons, peaches, bananas, etc.). This is probably one of the best perks of working in the Beijing office.

Duck gizzards at the excellent Chinese restaurant I mentioned earlier. Unfortunately I didn’t photograph the other dishes we had, but they were all excellent. I think we had some fried duck liver dish and probably some eggplant dish.

Potato with meat at a mediocre restaurant, the potatoes were good, but the meat was tough.

Excellent curry Udon at a Japanese restaurant behind DRC (Diplomatic Residential Compound) in Chaoyang

My wife keeping Tudor busy at the The Fish Head restaurant - we went looking for the Noodle Loft restaurant where Anthony Bourdain had one show but we didn’t find it (I think it closed/moved because the driver dropped us at what seemed to be a former restaurant now closed). We walked from there to The Fish Head restaurant, it was pretty good and clean. 

Lobsters at The Fish Head restaurant - not our dinner that day :-)

Excellent desserts at I-Manji Desserts in Raffle City. This little place specializes only in desserts, they were very tasty, with strange textures, and flavors. In the picture: on the left: dumplings filled with Mango, on the right: some ‘vanilla soup’ with mangoes, dried fruits (which strangely had a smokey flavor like prosciutto and worked really well with everything else), and ‘basil-seeds’. This place was really good, we’ll definitively go back to try everything they have on the menu.

After visiting Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, we stopped and rested in Beihai park. This is a video of our kids dancing at Beihai Park during a karaoke. The girl singing had a very nice voice.

Our kids playing at the Sanlitun Village water fountain in Beijing, they probably played for 10-15 minutes, Tudor joined as well even though he seems hesitant in this one minute video.