January 19, 2023
Veganizing "Friends": Dr. Roger's Oysters & Middle Eastern Couscousby Randi / September 16, 2013
A lone fisherman on Inle Lake
The final leg of our journey through Myanmar centered around a relaxing – and then unfortunately horrendous – stay in Inle Lake, followed by a long, arduous, and amazing trek to the pilgrimage site of Golden Rock.
After another bucket-jumper flight to Heho to visit the lake villages, we stopped in Pindaya to see the famous Pindaya caves. The caves are a must-see, because they house more than 8,000 Buddha sculptures!
After another bucket-jumper flight to Heho to visit the lake villages, we stopped in Pindaya to see the famous Pindaya caves. The caves are a must-see, because they house more than 8,000 Buddha sculptures!
This goes on for so long
I kept expecting one to move
The Buddha images in Pindaya caves range in age from modern to several hundred years old. All kinds of people can donate the statues, from important government officials to civilians, so the mix is impressive.
In addition to the inside of the caves, the outside is really fun too. There’s this legend of princesses who, while bathing in the lake, were captured by a giant spider and trapped in the caves. Then, Prince Kummabhaya (Peter, Paul & Mary’s friend) saved them by shooting the spider with his bow and arrow. This legend is depicted at the entrance to the caves:
In addition to the inside of the caves, the outside is really fun too. There’s this legend of princesses who, while bathing in the lake, were captured by a giant spider and trapped in the caves. Then, Prince Kummabhaya (Peter, Paul & Mary’s friend) saved them by shooting the spider with his bow and arrow. This legend is depicted at the entrance to the caves:
That’s me laughing instead of recoiling from the spider. #Vegans
Transport to our hotel
After visiting Pindaya, we finally made our way to Inle Lake and to our hotel, Paradise Inle Resort. Inle Lake is a freshwater area in the Shan State (namesake of the super comfortable shan pants), and most people stay in some type of ‘resort’ while they explore the lake villages by boat during the day. You can only get around by boat – these hotels and villages are single buildings standing in the water (see below). No roads, just water. It’s pretty awesome. Aside from seeing the village markets and a few pagodas, there’s not much to do, hence the ‘resorts’ expect you to eat all your meals there and be there after dark.
A village in Inle Lake
Our hotel. It looks like that green part is land, but it’s not! Floating gardens!
At first, I was kind of upset that we had so many days in the Lakes and there was so little to do, but then…then it was the best thing ever. Because we got sick. REALLY sick. I thought I cholera. Luckily, my travel doctor (you need lots of shots for this country) had said, before the trip, “You’re going to get sick. Really sick. Here’s what you take when you do,” so we had proper medicine. Kind of hilarious, the doctor just hearing “Myanmar” and saying, yeah, no matter what you do, drink only bottled water eat only cooked food, whatever, you’re still going to get sick. And we did. Thank goodness this hotel was the one with television and wifi. It was the perfect place for the worst sickness ever! (Side note: ‘Joyful Noise’ is a fun movie to watch when you are half gone. Also, they blurred Keke Palmer’s cleavage in it! Hahahah! No one else’s cleavage, not Dolly Parton’s or anything, but the teenager’s. So weird!)
A woman removing the thread from lotus leaves 
Women making cheroot |
Thankfully, we recovered and got to see all the Lake sights. We visited lotus weavers, who do everything from pull the thread from lotus leaves to spin the thread into finished products for sales. Everyone was really nice, letting us watch them work. This lady tied some lotus thread around my wrist. It was really sweet.
We visited cheroot makers as well. Cheroot is a type of cigar, filled with all kinds of leaves and herbs and other addicting stuff. They are inexpensive and insanely popular. They are also mentioned in Rudyard Kipling’s poem “On the Road to Mandalay”, which I mentioned before:
|
An’ I seed her first a-smokin’ of a whackin’ white cheroot,
An’ a-wastin’ Christian kisses on an ‘eathen idol’s foot
|
I like it because you have to say ‘foot’ funny.
Anyway, the next place we visited in the Lakes will probably be your favorite – the Burmese Cat Sanctuary! We played with cats, and it was adorable. And they seemed to be well taken care of. It was also one of the nicest buildings we saw. I’m pretty sure you can stay here, as there were a few nice looking guest rooms. And there’s also a cafe, but we didn’t have a chance to look at the menu. These cats were so friendly. They have the run of the house and the gardens outside. |
|
Burmese Cat Sanctuary
|
There are so many cool things to see in this area, like these floating gardens:
And the impressively nimble fishermen, who famously stand on one leg, at the stern of the boat, while wrapping the other leg around the oar, handling the net while fishing pretty much hands-free. It’s crazy to watch: |
|
A fisherman practicing hands-free yoga-style fishing
|
As with all other towns in Burma, the daily markets are the biggest draw. The ones in Inle Lake were my favorite, because they sold this special tofu made from split peas! It’s found only in this region, and I’m so mad I couldn’t get to try it because of all the sickness. And the lack of cooking equipment. I need to go back ASAP just for this tofu.
The markets are usually really crowded, great for meeting people and getting a feel of a certain town. They’re also great for one of my favorite things – taking pictures of adorable children (boyfriend calls me the ‘babysnatcher’). 
Cute child! In a hat! 
Potato rice ball 
That’s my parasol he’s dancing with! |
Split pea tofu 
Cute child friends! Even though I didn’t get to eat the tofu, I did have some nice things once I was able to eat again. The hotel had this amazingly carbtastic potato-rice ball for breakfast, and we also saw women making huge, feather-light rice cakes.
Making rice cakes But the coolest thing that happened during the trip was when we stumbled upon a community’s celebration of young boys’ novitiation – they were about to be sent as novices to study at a monastery, to one day become monks. They saw us standing pretty far away, and without having any shared words they invited us to celebrate with them.
Big party, everyone’s invited! I also got a picture of some English graffiti! Street art is my favorite thing to photograph (see: this site’s home page banner!).
|
Graffiti!
The last part of our journey was a visit to Golden Rock, the hard-to-reach pilgrimage site. We flew back to Yangon from Heho, then drove for a long time, and then…and then we were packed onto this truck. And I mean packed. We thought we were going to wait for the next truck, but they squeezed us onto this one. I have never had so little personal space. The guy I was next to was great though; he kept saying “USA!” and “Obama!”. Hilarious. We drove through the mountains in this truck for about 45 minutes, and then it drops you off and you walk another 45 minutes or so to the Golden Rock area. It was quite a day, but so worth it. Look at this:
|
How awesome is this! It’s such a precarious perch, and no one understands how it is staying put (except to praise Buddha for it). The effort you have to put in to get here is so worth it. It was a fantastic final sight in Myanmar.
Because of how far it is from everything, you stay overnight in the area. We stayed at a great hotel right outside the entrance, on a street peppered with vendors, a few of whom sell rice balls that are vegan-friendly. Staying overnight lets you see this amazing sight in the daytime, at sunrise, and of course at night, when the grounds light up and the Rock looks like it is truly lit up by some higher force. |
|
Well, it wasn’t exactly our last thing. We did have to go back to Yangon for a day or two before flying out of the country. We learned so much on our trip and developed such tolerance for difficult cultural differences that this sign, below, no longer phased us. Well…almost didn’t.
WHICH WAY!!!! WHICH WAY DO I GO!!! AHHHHH!!!!!
Related Posts
Beijing, China: Give Me All Your Dumplings and Also All The Other Food
Remember a few weeks ago I was complaining about something or other, as I do, and got scared that I wouldn’t be able to find vegan dumplings in China, the one thing that would make it all worth it? Haha maybe dumplings aren’t that powerful but they are amazing and I had so many dumplings, guys. We even went to a place just called Vegetarian Dumpling. Twice. The food in Beijing was incredible, and I would happily go back there to hit more of the places on my list. After the boring food of Siberia and Mongolia, China so far has been a food paradise. There’s enough English spoken in Beijing that finding out what was vegan at regular restaurants was pretty simple, but when there are so many all vegan 0r vegetarian restaurants to try, why even bother elsewhere?
As soon as we got to Beijing, we walked from our hotel to one of the SUHU Vegetarian Tiger locations, the one in the Fullink Plaza. We walked at least an hour (we really wanted to move and not get on another train by taking the strong metro system immediately), so by the time we arrived we were super hungry and ready to pounce like the titular tiger but on vegan food. It was a weird time because we landed in the city in the afternoon, so we got to SUHU at about 4pm. Luckily they don’t close in between regular meal times, like so many restaurants in China do. However, it was super awkward because 99% of their numerous staff was sleeping at tables with curtains drawn around them. I thought only the Spanish napped in the afternoon while still at work! The restaurant is giant, and very nice, but seeing all these sleeping workers and trying not to bother them was hilariously weird. Whatever, I’m just glad someone was awake to let us in and cook for us, because this is one of my favorite restaurants, anywhere.
Beautiful, right? Behind that center curtain was a table full of a dozen sleeping Chinese people
Given how tired I was after the train and the super loud Canadians I had to deal with, trying to choose what to order from the NEVERENDING MENU was actually stressful. Amazingly lucky, but stressful! Not only was there a big coffee-table-book style menu measuring 13×15 inches with beautiful full size pictures of everything, but they had a second smaller menu with even more house specialies. Ahh it was too much choice! And, even though it says Vegetarian right in the name, and on HappyCow it’s listed as a vegetarian not a vegan restaurant, the About page of the menu says they don’t use dairy or eggs, so like, maybe there’s some honey in some desserts but that doesn’t help me decide what food to order! How do people without special diets order at regular restaurants?! How do you know what you want if there’s not just one vegan option?
Bean curd noodles and TOON
little eels
We decided before we ordered that we would come back another day, which took a lot of the pressure off. First of all, I needed to get a toon dish, because Jojo raved about toon. I chose bean curd ‘noodles’ (like fettuccine-shaped strips I’ve seen everywhere in China) mixed with the delicate green leaf that I learned was toon. I had no idea! It’s like a little green sprout (little green ghouls mannn!) and it’s usually eaten raw so sign me up. This was a perfect dish for me after all this travel – the very mild freshness of toon mixed with the protein-packed bean curd to make a great starter salad. Definitely the kind of thing I would eat every day!
We next tried one of the famed vegetarian eel dishes. I was surprised to see how tiny the portion was, considering how the other plates were pretty big, but considering how much food we ordered, it was for the best (although for the price, it’s kind of a dick move). The eel did not disappoint! It’s been a minute since I’ve had real eel, so my memory is hazy, but it tasted as much like the real thing as I’d want! Caramelized slightly sweet skin and that really good fishy-but-not-gross-fishy flavor and a pretty spot-on texture, so I was a fan of this dish. Maybe I do want more…in the past…however that works.
noodles and veggies and peanuts and mushrooms and more veggies ahhh
DUMPLINGS
Next we tried a simple but delicious noodle dish, with glass noodles, spiralized and marinated vegetables of all/indiscriminate sorts, tofu skin, peanuts, mushrooms, and sesame seeds and oil. It was so yummy! And, of course, because they had dumplings on the menu, I had to get them! I got the Shanghai style, which are a little soupier (but not as soupy as legit soup dumplings which I really want to find vegan version of SOMETIME ughh. These were I think cabbage and miscellaneous other veg. I had been in China for like 3 hours and hadn’t had dumplings yet; I had a quota to fulfill! They were good! Are any dumplings ever bad?? Ahhh love them.
The craziest thing we ordered at SUHU was the purple yam. I know you’re thinking, like, okay, that’s just what most people think are sweet potatoes, what’s the big deal. Well just look at how it was served:
I KNOW
Can you even believe that that whipped cream looking business comes from a tuber? The whipped yam was mixed with a little sugar and a little magic and drizzled with blueberry sauce. It was SO good. It tasted like cheesecake, actually, but not in a disgusting cheesecake way, in an amaaazing way. Literally the only problem with this was that three fluffy clouds of it were too many. It’s so filling and rich-seeming that it’s hard to eat a lot of. But it was so delicious!
some kind of grass
On our other visit, we ordered much more conservatively. Well, not much. Actually, maybe not at all. We never do. For my requisite green vegetable, I got this lightly sauteed dish of what I want to say are pea shoots, though it was a lot more sturdy of a stem than I’m used to with those – in a good way, they kept some bite and weren’t mushy. Very good! The mildness of this dish was necessary to combat the incredible heat of our tofu dish.
CHILIEST TOFU DISH EVER JOJO TURN AWAY
The tofu dish was incredible – dense (obviously pressed, good job!) hard little cubes of tofu covered in a spicy garlicky black sauce, with beans (beans!) of various sorts, a few small-cut vegetables, and most of all, CHILI and other peppers that made it suuuper spicy! We like spicy food (and are super excited for Sichuan province) so this was awesome. And despite the air conditioning in the restaurant, we were actually sweating and had to blow our noses a lot while eating it! Haha so fun!
Less fun was our Singapore noodle dish, which on the menu looked like a good plate of noodles and accompaniment but in reality was a bowl of broth with noodles (and lots of chilis!) in it! We didn’t order soup! It was fine, just a little bit not what we wanted.
SOUP! I MEAN NOODLE SOUP! I MEAN SOUP!
Obviously, I couldn’t go a meal without ordering dumplings, so this time I got the regular steamed dumplings, which were great, as all dumplings are. The two different colors had slightly different tangs to them but still it was mostly a game of cabbage, tofu, and some other standard dumpling stuff. I packed up most of these for the train to Shanghai we took later that last night, and they were perfect train food.
dumplings!
trickster little sesame buns
I wanted to order the hatcake that Jojo recommended, but for some reason my brain wanted me to order sesame buns to save for dessert later. I assumed they were the sweet, super chewy type of sesame bun I love from Chinatowns the world over, but instead they were buttery and flaky, falling apart in your mouth. Which sounds amazing, I know, and they were good, but I just don’t really like buttery and flaky, I like chewy. Regardless, SUHU was incredible and if I’m ever back in Beijing it would probably be my first stop.
I guess it’s really called Vegetarian AND Dumpling but no one says that
Well, it might be my second stop. Another place I absolutely adored was the well-named Vegetarian Dumpling, which was only 15 minutes walk from our hotel and so easy to get to that I went myself (without google maps or cell access at all!) once. The menu has English translations, the dumpling list has eggs next to the stuff that has eggs, it has good wifi, and it was full of actual Chinese people. All wins!
well-marked egg alerts!
The number of dumplings without the egg symbol is a bit limited, but they all still sounded great so we chose three. I read a lot about how Vegetarian Dumpling makes you order a double order of each kind you want, so 10 dumplings instead of the 5 that come in one order. I said, 1) if that was the case why don’t they just make the order size 10? and b) if it is true/so stupid then we will just cross one of the three we chose off!
The waitress came, looked at our order form (you check off what dishes you want and how many of them), and changed all the 1’s we put next to the dumplings into 2’s. So, it is true, and they are not just changing the official order size and price which makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE, but anyway, in more important news, we idiots could not decide what dumpling to cross off because they all sounded good so we just said FORGET IT BRING US ALL 30 DUMPLINGS. 30 dumplings is a lot, guys.
And guess what, having a limited number of vegan dumpling choices did not make ordering here any easier, because they still had an EPIC long menu of regular Chinese food! Ahhhh it looked just as good if not better than SUHU. We decided on a sauteed green vegetable with beans (BEANS!), plus one of their advertised (on the wall) specialties – a stewed meatball and cabbage (or other similar green) dish. SO MUCH FOOD. And it was all great.
30 DUMPLINGS
AHHH SO MANY DUMPLINGS! They were all great too. We got the cabbage and peanut, which was probably the weakest of the three but hey still a dumpling; the carrot, cucumber, black mushroom, black fungus (how’s that different) and vermicelli kind, which was great; and the sweet and sour shredded potato option, which somehow was the best of the three. SO interesting and great! You’d think that after struggling to eat 15 dumplings each I would be sooo over them by now, but that lasted approximately 12 hours.
The stewed meatball dish we got was one of the best things we ate in Beijing. It had NO business being that incredible. So delicious! Oh man! And the greens and beans were great too, if standard, but that’s what I want out of my greens usually.
THAT’S A SPICY MEATABALL no it wasn’t spicy but it was delish
Greens & beans are my favorite thing! Greens & beans are my favorite (beat) thing!
I was ecstatic to see cucumber juice on the list of fresh juices, the only non-fruit (well they have carrot but that doesn’t count) option. I ordered it and was SO happy to discover that it really was JUST cucumber juice! No mixing with apple or other bullshit that every non-Chinese juice place does! It was sooo good. I would soon learn that plain cucumber juice is hella prevalent all over China! Score!
Z ordered a drink called ‘syrup of plum’ out of sheer curiosity. It was not delicious.
I went back another night and had an incredible homestyle tofu dish, cooked and served in a black clay pot that DID NOT COOL OFF. I also had this raw cabbage and peanut salad that was just perfection.
I went back another night and had an incredible homestyle tofu dish, cooked and served in a black clay pot that DID NOT COOL OFF. I also had this raw cabbage and peanut salad that was just perfection.
The tofu dish was my very first dish that would fall under the ‘gelatinous’ category of Chinese cuisine! I don’t know how they did it or why but it was good and not a gross consistency as I’d expect! The cabbage salad was a perfect food for me. The dressing was light and soo delicious, very fresh herb-y and if I didn’t have such a bastardized palette I’d tell you which herbs.
Did I…did I not get dumplings this time??? What’s wrong with me!
I love Vegetarian Dumpling so much. It was pretty darn cheap, too, for SOOO much food. I wish they had one closer to me.
Another vegetarian restaurant we went to was Baihe Lily. This was not our first choice – after seeing the Lama and Confucian Temples, we wanted to go to a very closeby veg restaurant called Xu Xiang Zhai Vegetarian that was in the book and highly recommended. It sounded amazing! We got there, and it was NO LONGER IN EXISTENCE. BOOOO. The closest veg restaurant we could find on Google (we were hangry, no time to travel to something too far) was Baihe Lily. The food was good, but I can’t recommend it really because it’s super overpriced, frustrating to order, and impossible to get service.
First of all, the menus are tablets. Like, electronic little fake iPad looking jawns. So cool and technologically advanced, right? No it was the moooost annoying thing ever. You can’t go back and look at things that looked good without going through 100 other pictures, and then trying to go back and find where you left off. WORST OF ALL, you can’t keep going through and pointing to the things you want to order! They had a kind of online shopping style checkout way to order, by adding things to your cart, but unlike the menu descriptions, the things added only in Chinese so if you added something by accident you couldn’t figure out which thing to delete and would just have to start over and OMG MY AGITAAAA.
Second, no one came back to the dining room to do any of the service in an appropriate fashion. We had to keep flagging someone out in the lobby to order, to pay, &c. During our meal, a white woman was seated at the table next to us. We had seen her at the temples that morning so we made friendly small talk. We finished our meal before anyone even came to give her A MENU. When we saw someone, we asked ‘can someone please get this girl a menu?’ and no one did, so she left without even ordering. UNACCEPTABLE.
Luckily, the food was pretty great. We had this cool vegetarian spare rib-meat kind of dish that was excellent, and of course a plate of leafy greens.
They had a salad-y handroll looking thing that I’m always into, full of sprouts and other salad-y things. Unfortunately, the pink sauce tasting weirdly strawberry yogurty, and even if it was vegan, yogurt is gross, so blech. It reminded me of the gross pink dip that comes in supermarket fruit trays. no no no.
We of course got a noodle dish that was really good, the mix-it-yourself kind that has all the good herbs and peanuts and cucumber strips and spiciness but then when you mix it together like you have to in order to eat it all the good stuff sinks to the bottom and even though that’s annoying that’s just science and it’s all still soo good. We lastly got one of my favorite things, the fried vegetarian fish roll sort of jawn that I get all the time at our favorite London Chinatown restaurant. Leong’s Legends.
I love these weird fried tofu-skin-wrapped veggie fish rolls so much I obviously forgot to take a picture before I ate half
So, yeah, all the food was mostly great! So if you are okay with bad service and frustrating order process, then by all means go to Baihe. But, it was also the most expensive restaurant we had been to since, well, the start of this summer’s travels! Sure it wasn’t as much as a meal like this would cost in London, but that’s a pretty high bar considering how expensive London is and how cheap China is. A pot of the most basic tea, for example, was 65 yuan – at most other places it’s, like, 10. That’s crazy! We did not order the tea.
A few meals were not at all-vegetarian restaurants, if you can believe it! In the APM Mall (SO MANY MALLS IN BEIJING I LOVE IT, AIR CONDITIONING AND BUBBLE TEA!) was an outpost of the very famous Din Tai Fung restaurant, which is in the New York Times Top 10 in the world, apparently. Crazy. There’s one opening soon in London, which I imagine will be priced at 100x as much, because it was pretty cheap and casual and hectic for being so highly ranked. It also was, like, just okay. Granted, they just didn’t have that much for vegans, so I got the standard Chinese restaurant order of a sauteed garlicky leafy green plus another leafy green with bean curd (the smallest amount of bean curd ever served in China) and plain rice. It was fine, perfunctory, but like, not even in the top ten of restaurants we went to in Beijing. I’m sure for Z it was better. The best thing about it, though, was that an official manager lady, complete with microphone headset for running the large restaurant, came over with not-our-waiter, and asked if they would take our photos while we were eating! We were like…seriously? We are used to people asking to take our pictures, or take pics with us, because we are white, but that’s out in the world from regular people. Being asked by the MANAGER of an important restaurant? SO WEIRD! And we were eating! I was literally chewing with food in my mouth and was like um noo thanks you are not taking me with my mouth full of food and then what, putting a poster on the front wall? To quote Danielle Brooks as Sophia in The Color Purple, ‘heeeeeeell no. HELL NO.’ But like, why the manager? And why us? It was full of other whites who were slightly less sweaty, so why us? Did they think I was famous? Who did they think I was? Now I’m curious. But thank goodness I’m not now on Din Tai Fung’s promotional materials before I was able to take my 3rd shower of the day.
Basic food at Din Tai Fung
Fortunately, outside the APM mall (and just everywhere on the streets) are tons of fruit carts selling great fresh fruit. I scored this little bucket of melon for 10 yuan.
Another night, we went into another random mall and found a decent restaurant. I got a thing of greens (always!) and the FUNNIEST salad I’ve ever seen. It was amazing.
Guys I have no idea what this salad vegetable is! The menu translated as some sort of ice preserved plant, but it wasn’t iceberg lettuce, as I kind of suspected. If you look closely at the stem, you can see little clear beading, like water droplets. But it wasn’t little ice crystals! It was like…fake ice crystals? But it didn’t affect the taste at all, it just somehow made the VEGETABLE kind of icy? It was insane we were hysterical just like what is going on! It was actually really good. It came with a nice sesame dressing but the taste of the vegetable itself was so good and interesting that we preferred it plain. Just like…what is the process they put it through?! It’s so cray.
Early in our visit, we went to the Zheng Long Zhai Vegetarian Shop to stock up on goodies, as per Jojo’s recommendation. It is a little hard to find and not really near anything convenient, but it’s so worth going to. They have all these amazing jerky packets, like beef jerky and stuff, of 100 different sorts and it’s all vegan!
I can’t rotate the picture above without crashing the computer (thanks Weebly!), but you can see it’s a LOT of fun stuff. I bought one or two of literally all the jerky options, and most are really good. A little soft for my taste (I’m not supposed to be cooking them…right? They are portable food!…right?) but great, seitan-y goodness. They will so come in handy in the ‘stans, if I don’t eat them all beforehand. I also got two pancake-style single-serving food things, one yuba, and one mushroom. I wish I got more of them because they were delicious. Darn. Then, they have a giant bakery section, for such an incredibly tiny store (so tiny). Everything apparently is vegan! I got a box of crunchy rice cakes that I thought would be like the ones I was addicted to in Thailand – that is, sugary – but they were just plain rice! I was kind of mad but it’s better because they make great daytime snacks while out and about instead of just dessert. I got a few little pastry things that looked great but ended up being buttery flaky things, which you know by now aren’t my favorite, but they were still good. My favorite thing was that pancake looking thing! It was filled with a just barely sweet bean paste and I wish I got a ton of them! So yummy. The cellophane bag of little brown squares I assumed would be peanutty, but despite being fine I really cannot tell what the crap they are. The strangest thing about Chinese dessert, I’ve learned, is that – for a country where people drink bubble tea and juice and all drinks so flipping sweet that just one sip will give you the ‘beetus, their desserts have the smallest amounts of sugar possible to still qualify as dessert. Actually, some things I wouldn’t even let qualify as dessert, they are so non-sweet! It’s crazy! Seriously, I bought a tea from a fridge case once and had to throw it away because it was like pure high-fructose corn syrup. And I get my bubble teas (MY FAVORITE THING NOW, more on those in later posts because I didn’t take pics in Beijing I was too busy eating all the tapioca balls immediately and pouring out the tea just kidding but I would do that) at the ‘zero sugar’ or ‘25% the regular sugar’ options, and they are still hella sweet! It’s so weird that all the drinks are way too sugary but the desserts aren’t sugary enough! Let the two categories share the sugar amounts and both would then be perfect!
Regardless, this vegetarian shop is a must visit if you are traveling for a while and need snacks and emergency protein strips.
In the complete opposite world, we also stopped at a Wal-Mart. They have Wal-Marts all over China! And while 90% is Chinese products, they do have a decent amount of recognizable stuff. Like sooo many weird flavored Oreos! We tried the vanilla sundae kind – reeeeally good! – and the strawberry kind – reeeeally gross! We got some candy and some drinks, including a lot of what we thought was cranberry and blueberry juice (as per doctor’s orders!), a really good apple cider vinegar drink, and an almond milk. Some of that is pictured; I think I forgot to take stuff out of another bag.
The giant carton of coconut water came in handy on our exhausting sweaty trek of the Great Wall (next post!). Those macadamia chocolates are accidentally vegan and we see them EVERYWHERE! Remind me to get more before we leave China. They’re even in Family Marts and 7-11! Those little blue and red tubes in the middle, guess what they are? SINGLE SERVE PEANUT BUTTER PACKS BOIIIII! And the blue is Skippy! Ahhhh! I don’t like Skippy when I’m home but I’m very excited about having it in central Asia! The red kind is the Chinese (and cheaper) option. Yas peanut butter!
Lastly, I have to share one of my favorite things. After my doctor’s appointment, we went into a nearby office building to pee, and of course the basement where the toilets were had an epic food court/mall style set up because every single building does. The very first thing I ran into?
A JUICE BAR!!! Despite doctor’s orders to consume berries, I of course ordered the greenest option on the menu (which was also in English!) because I can’t not! If it’s my only real green juice/smoothie opportunity for 4 months, I’m going to get the greenest one obviously! It was peasprouts, lettuce, pineapple, apple, and orange I think. I think I added spinach? It tasted just like peashoots, and you know what? I loved it. (Z did not.)
Well that’s all the food in Beijing that I have pictures of, so that’s all we’re going to talk about! The food really is incredible. I’m sure with five weeks in China, I’ll get sick of Chinese food at some point, but I don’t see that happening soon.
Kiev (Kyiv though) Ukraine: Nice City, Interesting Sights, Indeterminate Vibe
I have to admit that I did not know about Kyiv. Not Kiev; I knew about Kiev. But that’s all I knew. Let me splain. As we planned our trip from Russia through Eastern Europe and back home to London, my husband said “we should go to Kyiv”- pronounced Keev. And I said “where is this ‘Keev’ I never heard of it” and he was like “Kyiv is the capital of Ukraine??” and I was like “no that’s Kiev and it is pronounced ‘Kee-ev'”and he was like “wat” and I was like “what is happening” and I learned that Kiev (‘Kee-ev’) is the Russian word for the city, and since gaining their independence, Ukrainians have been very serious about reclaiming their own word for their capital city, ‘Kyiv’ (Keev), the one syllable version that was unknown to me. Can we blame the Russian bots for my ignorance? Now I’m all smarted up and ready to talk about this great city, Kyiv. Or Kiev, if you wanted to I guess. I like the sound of the two-syllable evil version better, but my preferences as a non-Ukrainian don’t matter. Do as the people want us to. It’s Kyiv.
i know this is a hotel but come on pretty
Now that that’s sorted, let’s talk about this charming city. We were solidly back in Eastern Europe now, having left Mother Russia. Oh let’s talk about that leaving bit, shall we. After our less-than-a-day return to Moscow, we caught an overnight train – our second-to-last one of the trip!! – from Moscow to Kyiv. This train was the worst experience yet, isn’t that so fun??? I know some of you who kept up through all the China and Uzbek trains are like, what how on earth could it be worse? What about those 8 hour border stops where you had to sneak into the bathrooms to pee? What about the old Chinese lady in your bed? Well those were all terrible, yes, but hear me out. When we boarded, I thought we were soo lucky because the toilets were automated! Like Amtrak, with the lit-up flush buttons and stuff! They weren’t just holes opening up onto the track! Unfortunately, that luster was short-lived. Apparently the super-fancy (not fancy, basic technology) toilets very quickly broke, and since the conductor isn’t an engineer, he just duct-taped the toilet shut, rendering it unusable for the rest of the journey. I trekked down to the other end of the carriage with a sigh, which turned into a bigger, more horrified scream when I saw that that toilet was ALSO taped shut. The next cabin on was the restaurant car! No toilets in there! And the next one in the other direction was the overcrowded platzkart, packed full of people in bunk beds in the open plan, with lines for the toilet at all hours and so resentful of people from other carriages on their turf. Those toilets were basic open-the-bottom-onto-the-tracks; apparently only those passengers with doors were given the fancy easily breakable toilets. So every hour throughout the night, I had to clamber through the terrifying open section that connects carriages, stepping on the giant metal chain links that wrenched forward and back with the train’s movement and trying not to fall while jerking the heavy carriage doors open with all my might. Over and over again!
I HATE UNCLE TRAINY you see what I did there
Thank all the lucky stars, I was okay. Pissed off and full of impotent rage that I couldn’t actually direct at anyone (I never saw the conductor people, and also what else could they have done), but okay. I was so excited to see Kyiv, which I know I am spelling in the progressive way but honestly I can’t stop saying Ki-ev in my head. Anyway, I didn’t know much about Ukraine going in, except that I had just recently started saying it without the ‘the’ that so many Americans seem to think is required – seriously why do we always call it The Ukraine?? it’s so weird! – and that Oksana Baiul was my favorite skater in 1994 and the only winner to come out of the whole Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan debacle. Well her and Margot Robbie. I was eager to learn more about the country through its well regarded capital city.
Our Russian language skillz would come in handy to understand all the signs in Cyrillic and all the similar sounding vocab, but despite much of the population speaking and/or understanding Russian, it would not be very wise to lead with speaking Russian. Since their independence from the Mother Country, Ukrainians have some tension, to say the least, with Russia, as we all do. We assumed, now that we were back in Europe, that it would be easy to get by with English. Surely most of the people know English! Spoiler, they don’t! It was very rare that we encountered English speakers. So follow Scar’s advice (not the Boy Scouts)(the Boy Scouts suck) and Be Prepared.
I realize this is just a hotel that we didn’t stay at and I shared a photo from a different angle above but it really represents the city’s aesthetic well
Our train arrived at about 7am, so we were exhausted and very much wanting to shower. Our last shower was in that random hostel in Moscow (was that the day before? Time had no meaning any longer). So we took a cab to our lodging. We were staying for the next few nights at the Theatre Boutique Apart-hotel, in a studio apartment situation that operated like a hotel, sort of, in that there was to be someone at a desk in the building of apartments to check us in. I initially liked how it sounded because theatre. The building was hard to find because it was set back in a kind of alley complex that was SUPER shady and graffitied and even at 7am just completely sketchy. I was skeptical. And unforch, because it was so early, no staffers were in yet. The maid was there, luckily, and was used to dealing with guests arriving at inopportune times, and she told us we could leave our stuff and come back in….six hours. I KNOW! I was soooo mad. Surely the main employee would be in at 9, right? And would call us and tell us that our room was ready before the godforsaken common check in time of 2pm? I could not wait six hours! But I had to! Ahhh! Anyway the ‘place’ we could leave our stuff was right there in the main hallway, reeeeeally not secure, so I was not feeling this place at all. Strike after strike. Z was like ‘who is going to steal our disgusting stuff tho’ and I was like ‘disgusting people tho’. I asked the maid if there was a bathroom we could use – we still needed to brush our teeth and stuff if we couldn’t shower yet! Well, this is an apartment hotel type jawn, not a hotel hotel with bathrooms on the main floor or anything, so no, the only bathrooms are in the rooms. Ahhhh! Luckily, the maid was super nice and showed us to one down the hall that was HER CLOSET. Like it had all her cleaning supplies in it and also all her snacks and changes of clothes and pictures and knick knacks and stuff and also a toilet and a tiny baby sink and it was sooooo awkward. I was so grumpy about this whole situation. But there’s no time to sulk when you are filthy and also in a new exciting city! We decided to go out and get food, and that story plus all related stories will come in a separate post about Kyiv food next. After that and some activities which I’ll talk about next, our room was ready, and it was GREAT. I was so happy because after how low my expectations had dropped since arriving, it was so much nicer than I hoped. It was clean and modern, all black and white and cool, with a nice bathroom and a big comfy bed with really good white sheets. I love white sheets. Anyway, so don’t judge a book by its cover or its lack of employees or main floor toilets and all that. I would highly recommend staying here.
St Sophia
The most important activity for us to do in the city center was see the St. Sophia Cathedral, the oldest surviving church in Kyiv. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site and you know how we feel about them (loves it!) so off we went to see how the old broad looked after about 1000 years of hard living. The complex is lovely. Note, the Bell Tower costs extra to climb up, but I think it’s worth it. It’s right at the entrance to the whole complex and is nice to end your visit with after seeing the rest of St. Sophia. Also, the Bell Tower is the only spot in the whole place where you are allowed to take pictures so it was worth it just so I can break up all my nonsense with pictures.
climb this biznatch
We had a nice time seeing all the interior churchiness and singing about how Jesus is an ocean, as one does. It’s said that in all the churches in Ukraine that ladies have to cover their heads because god hates seeing us evil-doers or whatever nonsense your religion teaches you to keep you down, but I don’t remember anyone telling me to do so here. I think they are more lenient with tourists. Anyway, we ended with the Bell Tower climb, because we like climbing this. I counted about 200 steps up before I stopped and lost track, which isn’t as bad as it could be buutttt the stairs were pretty, um, not reassuring as you could look through all the thin metal and exposed piping of the layout and see down forever and it was a little anxy. As you would expect of me because this is what I do when traveling in foreign lands and living my life, I banged my head super hard on a metal pipe despite there being a colored swatch on that section because it was low and apparently everyone hit their head on it before they decided to paint the cautionary alert on it but of course I am special and hit my head after they flagged it. It was really painful and we had to stop for a few minutes for the pain to subside and for me to run through the customary thoughts I have every time I hit my head which invariably have to do with Natasha Richardson. Luckily I was okay though, and it seems like Liam is now too. And the views from the top were nice.
“And the hands get heavy oh the hands I don’t know what to do with the hands or the feet”
Our next sight to see was the Golden Gate in the middle of the city, standing like a fortress to remind us of all the fortifications they once needed (prob still need) against enemies. It was named after the Golden Gate of Constantinople, and although it was completely destroyed during the Middle Ages, it was rebuilt by the Soviets in the ’80s. It’s a tad controversial, because no images of the original gate actually exist, so the rebuilding process was under scrutiny from historians et al. who were like ‘no THIS is what it should look like’ ‘ no THIS is’ ‘no YOU’RE mother was a hamster’ and finally Vlad over at the Soviet Historical Society was like ‘no guys this is what we’re doing, you disagree I kill you’ or something probably close to that.
The gate/fortress jawn is right at Zolotovoritsky Square, a lovely little square near a park and a nice row of restaurants and stuff. It’s a nice little city.
Okay so I THINK there was a lil church at the top of the Golden Gate?? And this is me in it?
looks like a funky curved lens doesn’t it like i’m in a funhouse mirror or something
This city is so nice, full of statues and greenery and beautiful buildings. I keep saying that, don’t I, that it was so ‘nice’ and I really hate that word. But there’s not much more I can think of to describe it, because I never really clicked with it. It was great to be back in Europe, and to see such lovely architecture and important monuments and relics of history and all, but I never really jived (jove?) with Kyiv. My husband liked it a lot more than I did, but I didn’t necessarily dislike it, not at all. I just didn’t connect with it. It was nice to look at, nice to be in, but I didn’t feel much for it. My heart wasn’t in it, despite its checking off all the proper points on my list like it was my Walter or my Frank in a Nora Ephron rom com before I met Tom Hanks. (Tom Hanks, btw, would be my Warsaw. Stay tuned for that, our next destination.)
who dat ninja
now that I like
As always, I loved finding funny signs or product names in stores, and despite being back in Europe, we still found some, like this brand of milk that can probably only be enjoyed by blond boys named Chad who swim for just-sub-Ivies.
Or this shop, which we made a LOT of very bad jokes about because Tories are the ones who would cut all arts funding in the UK you get?
AIN’T NO SUCH THING
We had a great time exploring Kyiv. I know you’re probably thinking…you didn’t do that much, right? Well, that’s because our main activity warrants its own post (coming next, along with a food post). The main reason for our visit to Kyiv, besides logistics, was to visit Chernobyl. We took an all day (like seriously from dawn till nighttime) tour of the zone of the infamous, horrible nuclear disaster, and it was astounding. Devastating, heartbreaking, and we learned so much that is only now coming to light about the disaster. It’s a truly worthwhile trip to take if you are in Ukraine or in Kyiv, which, despite my not clicking with it whole-heartedly, I still do recommend visiting!
