November 2007 Archives

The Summer Palace is one of the historical destinations everyone should try to visit at least once. Located just outside the 3rd Ring Road, It's included on most Beijing tour ioutings and is also a popular park for Beijing residents looking for a place to escape concrete and steel. The Summer Palace has survived two separate attacks since it's creation in 1750, the most recent during the Boxer Rebellion. It was best known as the summer resort of Empress Dowager Cixi. While the architecture and surrounding scenery is always beautiful, catching the Summer Palace on a clear day is truly breath taking. Be sure to take the boat ride across the nearby Kunming Lake for some of the best views.

If you're feeling adventurous and want to experience food you're not likely to find in your home country, Lao Hanzi is the perfect restaurant destination. Located on the edge of the Houhai lake area, this is one of the true culinary bargains in Beijing. Aside from some of the best whole fish selection I had while dining in the city, Lao Hanzi offers a number of things off the culinary beaten path. Fried snake, which is a little bony and fits the "tastes like chicken" cliche, is a perfect choice for adventurous eating without taking any risks. If you like prawns, you can't go wrong with the bucket of rock salt cooked with enormous shrimp skewered and buried in the salt (yes, you are supposed to eat the head and the shell). Numerous animal parts are on the menu as the Hakka palate is from the part of China where anything is fair game at the dinner table. This is a restaurant where you will likely be surrounded by locals as it isn't a frequent tourist destination, which is always a good thing in my book. Plan on dinner lasting for at least 2 hours as this is an experience.

Location: 1/F, Jiezuo Building, 57 Xingfucun Zhonglu
幸福村中路57号杰座大厦1层

The Red Theater, located in Beijing's Chongwen district, offers Vegas-style Kung Fu entertainment, complete with requisite lights, fog and bombastic music. It's Kung Fu if Cirque De Soleil did Kung Fu. The show tracks the story of a boy who's dropped off at a Buddhist temple by his mother and slowly grows through kung fu training and temptation into the next leader of the temple. The video above offers a better intro to the show than anything I could possibly say about it.

No photographing or videotaping are allowed during the performance because the theater makes most of its money selling you DVDs and trinkets after the show.

Like any good college neighborhood, the Haidian area housing both Bei Da (Peking University) and TsingHua, has a bar district ready to cater to students looking for a party. Propaganda is possibly the best dance bar in the area, playing a popular mix of dance music from Europe and hip-hop from the United States. The crowd is largely foreigners and the bartenders speak reasonably good English, so if your Chinese is rusty, you'll do okay. Like most bars in China, if you want to sit down, you need to pay for bottle service.

To get here, simply tell a cab driver you want to go to "Wu Dao Kou Jiu Ba Jie" (pronounced: woo dow coe jeeoh bah jeeuh), which is the location of Propaganda, Lush, and a couple great burger and pizza joints.

Here's a video taken outside Propaganda with Spanish language:

Mexican food is nearly impossible to find in Beijing. As of August 2007, Taco Bell hadn't opened a single store closer than Shanghai. This made El Fogoncito something of a culinary oasis in Beijing.

Four weeks into my most recent trip to China I was sick of noodles and rice and had a craving for Mexican food. Lucky for me, one of the members of my travel group was a Mexican national, who contacted a friend she knew through the Mexican Embassy, who turned us on to El Fogoncito. The restaurant is part of a chain based in Mexico City, with remarkably authentic food. Tacos, burritos, and even the fajita dish are all lightly seasoned, with various salsas and guacamole available to garnish your dish and spice it up. Tortilla chips are heavier than anything I've sampled in either the U.S. or Mexico, but a welcome change. The guacamole is a bit unusual, consisting of something closer to a sauce, but it's apparently hard to track down avocados anywhere in China. Several Mexican beers and many tequilas are available from the bar.

This video is in Spanish, but shows the inside of the Beijing El Fogoncito:

1-01, Bldg. 19, Wanda Guangchang, 93 Jianguo Lu, Chaoyang district (phone: 5820 6551). Open 10am-2pm, 4:30-9:30pm.
富宫喜多西餐厅 朝阳区建国路93号万达广场19号楼1－01