gosh...i'm updating this blog like more than 6 months after i'm back from gip!!! a huge apology to those who bothered to check this blog now and then, only to be disappointed time and again... =( but anyway, better late than never right! so here goes... =P
After a fascinating tour of the terracotta warriors museum, it was time for lunch! =) our tour guide suggested this restaurant serving some buffet, but it cost 120rmb/pax or something like that... which we didn’t feel very worth it... bet it was some restaurant catering to foreign tourists, offering tour guides free food and commission if they brought guests... since we werent that hungry anyway, we decided to turn down the offer, and went to check out the restaurants nearby...
At first, we entered this decent-looking restaurant, serving a very special local dish of xi’an called “biang biang mian”... apparently, the chinese character “biang” is not an actual recognised chinese character, but was kinda invented by the locals... it has the MOST no. of strokes among the thousands of chinese characters we know today! Since the “biang biang noodles” was such a specialty, we wanted to give it a try...so we sat down and asked for a menu... but instead of handing us the menu, the waitress kept recommending for us to try their “biang biang mian”, saying how tasty it was, everyone liking it, and how worth it for us to share one big plate of it... she totally made it sound like some ultimate royal delicacy that only existed in heaven and not on earth... so we asked the most fundamental question... “HOW MUCH IS IT?” she seemed stumped by our question... hestitated a bit... stuttered a bit... and whispered to us softly in mandarin, “oh, don’t tell the others... but I’ll give you all a special price... others pay 88 rmb, but I’ll just charge you all 68 rmb” I was like...HUHZ??!! omg...do you think we’re idiots?! For that price, we can get a feast man... simi charge us lower, give us better price... did we all look like 3-year-olds man!! Damn turned off... totally 挂羊头卖狗肉!! Daylight robbery... -_- we didn’t bother wasting our time haggling, just stood right up and walked straight to the door of the 黑店...
Still stunned that something so outrageous could happen...(if it were in sg, people would totally complain and sue that shop until it would have to close down) but hmm... we were in china after all...as tourists... no point wasting our time on this kinda nonsense...-_- so well, we went around, in search of another restaurant, and we found one...walked in, asked for the menu, and was glad that all the prices were clearly listed... leaving little room for us to be cheated...
We wanted to try various noodles, as recommended by cui yichen, but the waitress told us that we would have to wait a long time coz there were already many orders before us, and the noodles take a longer preparation time… but well, since we were already there, we still wanted to try, but we just ordered 1 or 2 bowls of noodles, along with some miscellaneous dishes… a few pics of the food we had… =) erm...but i cant really remember the names of the dishes though...=S
After lunch, we went back to cui yichen’s car, where we met up with the guide again, and proceeded to our next destination – huaqing chi 华清池, known to be a royal bath area for the emperor and some of his favourite concubines, like the all-famous yang guifei 杨贵妃! After taking a look at the various bath pools, we proceeded to another area, with the famous “five-room house” （五间厅） where Chiang Kaishek 蒋介石 used as his field headquarters to strategically plan the suppression of the Red Army “围剿红军”. His subordinates, Generals Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng kept persuading him to stop the civil war and unite with the Communist Party to resist against Japanese aggressors, but it was all in vain. Finally, on 12 dec 1936, Zhang and Yang detained Chiang and launched the Xi’an Incident (西安事变), which shocked the world.
As we were about to leave, we saw a performance staged at the central area…there were various chinese cultural dances, so we stayed around to watch... but after a while, it got a little boring coz the dancers were not too pro... so we headed back to the car... we then dropped the guide off along the way and went back to the hotel... rested for a short while before going back to the muslim food street for dinner again... =)
huaqing chi pics
nice olden house with a mini fountain...
some pics by the lake...
performance just before we left...
Cui yichen brought us to search for this supposedly very nice 羊肉泡馍 stall, but we walked here, there & everywhere, only to realise that the stall had already closed... >_<
along the way, we got hungry, so we tried a beef 肉夹馍, which is like china’s version of a burger... some pieces of beef stuffed inside this dough bun, along with some thinly sliced cucumber... since the original羊肉泡馍 stall, we made do with another rather famous 羊肉泡馍 stall... 羊肉泡馍 is basically a bowl of mutton soup, which you eat with some bread... the idea is to tear the bread into very small pieces and soak them in the mutton soup so that it can fully absorb the taste of the soup... this particular stall we were at, is apparently an old brand name, and insists on cooking each and every bowl of mutton soup for a solid 7 or 17mins (I cant remember) before serving its customers... since it was the peak holiday season, the stall was really crowded and the waiting time was long... so to speed things up, the bread were already torn into very small pieces and thrown into the soup, instead of leaving it to the patrons to tear it up themselves, which would be more time-consuming... since there was 牛肉泡馍 (just beef instead of mutton), a few of us decided to take that instead... we’d gotten a little sick of mutton coz we’d been eating quite a lot of that over the past few days... and since I’ve never been a fond lover of mutton coz of its stronger taste, I decided beef would be a better choice... and true enough, I loved the 牛肉泡馍!!! Very delicious soup, with many pieces of bread crumbs soaked inside... hot soup in the cold weather... ultimate enjoyment! =P once again, we had a few cups of 酸梅汤, which was basically a drink made from sour plum powder, to go along with the food... delicious! =)
牛肉泡馍
After our main course, we continued walking around the muslim street, and bought this mwa chee-like snack... it had some sweet bean paste in between 2 layers of the chewy mua chee, and applied on top just before serving... tasted pretty good... =)
We also bought some local foodstuff, such as dried kiwi, dried cherry tomatoes, green bean cakes, walnuts, etc. to bring back with us... =) then we took a cold stroll back to our hotel again... =)
nice shot before we head back to the hotel... =)
