My mum will arrive in Beijing tonigh at 11.30pm and she will stay here with me for nearly 3 weeks. Today one of my main goals is to move all my stuffs to Anson's house where my mum will be staying in the next few weeks. So lucky to have Anson and his mum here in Beijing, made everything for mum so much easier. My mum won't even come visit if it aunty wasn't here in Beijing, sigh, I'm not important enough, haha. Looking at my extremely puffy luggage I realised, crap, I think it may be overweight already, crap!!! Lucky mum is coming, haha, she can help me I'm sure =P
Chrissy came to Beijing a few days ago, to spend Christmas with her family here in Beijing and today we're going to meet up for lunch before she leaves tomorrow. Chrissy is such a bubbly girl, it makes me really really happy to just see her. I call today 'The Kiwi Day'. Just look at the people that came to lunch (from left): Josi, Kayne, Chrissy, Gerard, Jordan Chong, Karina, Jordan Wang, Anson and me. All kiwis!!! All from AIESEC New Zealand, spending a fantastic 'summer' here in China, and now all sitting together for traditional Beijing roast duck in Beijing!!! What a small world?!!!!
We took the guys to Hong Lian Roast Duck Restaurant, the restaurant Peter took us last time. Due to logistic reasons we arrived at the restaurant at 2.30pm. Lucky we called yesterday to ask about the opening hours and the manager told us the restaurant opens from morning till night and there's no need to reserve the roast ducks. When we finally sat down and making orders the waitress told us that all the ducks were sold out and the kitchen is closed. We asked if they can open the kitchen again (well, start up the oven again) and she said they can't. We asked to speak to the manager because we were told yesterday that there's no need to make bookings or reservations. The manager kept on saying that they chefs are on breaks and they can't do anything for us, but we also had to explain our situation to her: we are all from overseas and now we're taking our friends who travelled from different cities in China to try their Beijing roast duck, and it's really bad if they can't serve us any ducks. The manager came back after talking to the chefs and gave us one of the worst replies: all the ducks for lunch time are sold out and the chefs don't want to make our orders with the ducks for tonight. This reason made Anson and I really unhappy and Anson asked the manager why would they not sell TWO DUCKS to customers who are already SITTING inside their restaurant but rather keep it for later, when they don't even know if they will have customers? I think this really got her and she went to negotiate again. Jordan played the nice guy on the table and kept asking her try; Anson played the bad guy and also pressured her to try more; eventually she came back with the good news and said that the chefs will make our ducks now but it'll take 40 minutes for it to roast. YAY!!!! Ducks~!
We were all quite happy that we'll finally get the roast ducks then we realised our main guest, Chrissy (who came all the way from Shanghai) is vegetarian! LOL!!! It was really funny but at least we're getting something after our hard effort of negotiating. There's one dish that I highly recommend though: corn with salty egg yolks. It's SOOOOOOO GOOD!!! Everyone loves it and it's the first dish to be finished. mmmmm I'm so gonna come back again, not for the ducks but for the corns!!!
Another thing that really made us going crazy was with our rice! We ordered a big bowl of rice to share for everyone right at the beginning (when we were also making orders of meals)but the rice just won't come to us. We slowly got really impatient and kept asking for the rice. Every time a waitor/waitress that heard our request will run to the kitchen so we thought, yay, rice coming soon. But, nope, they just run into the kitchen but never comes out with the rice. Even if some waitors came out with rice it wasn't for us. Eventually we pretty finished the dishes and not everyone wants rice now, so we asked if we can just have two bowls of rice but PLEASE HAVE THEM NOW! The manager took the order and asked the waitress to quickly go get our rice, and then there's our wait again. I bet they're unhappy with our 'duck issue' before and that's why they're not giving us our rice. When we finally got the rice (after we finished our meal), the waitor brought us the big bowl of rice....then there it goes again, we had to explain again and again why we don't want this and we want 2 little bowls only. When our poor rice finally came, we all applaused and cheered, haha, we must be crazy for everyone else in this restaurant. The english-speaking + noisy + crazy table.
Looking at the satisfying faces on everyone's face (excluding Chrissy) when we finally got our ducks, we all knew it was worth it to come here today. Especially for Jordan Chong, Kayne and Karina, they have never tried Beijing roast ducks before. Jordan Chong even took one of the pastry with him and was sniffing it on the way when we left the restaurant, haha, he must've really liked the roast ducks.
We went to Xidan shopping centre after lunch, partly to see what's good to buy with the big Christmas discounts. There is really nothing much we can do in China apart from eating and shopping, (apart from all the tourist-y places that we don't know about, hehe). After walking a few hours around Xidan, we decided to find food again. LOL!!! What a day! Just walking and eating!!! We went into the Joycity Shopping Centre in Xidan and sat down at a place that specialises in rice noodles in Yunnan style.
Here goes my day, I can't believe I just spent one day walking and eating, haha, what a day! I guess walking around counts as exercise in some way right? OMG, I can't imagine what my scale will say when I get back to NZ...... It's more than common to leave China with an extra few kilos piled on the body, all thanks to the tasty and cheap food. hmmmmm I need to do something about this, to save my wallet and save myself from the heartbreaking weightgain.
Mum arrived tonight a little bit earlier than her scheduled time. Anson went with me to pick mum up, to give us a hand with the luggage, thanks Ans =) Mum was so excited and couldn't stop talking and telling us about her journey on the plane from Auckland to Tokyo then to Beijing. This it the first time mum left New Zealand after we left in 1997, and obviously the first time for her to come back to China since we left. She is DEFINITELY VERY EXCITED! I miss mum, I really do, and it's so cute to see her going on and on with her stories (which even made our taxi driver laugh, lol). One thing I remember about mum's flight to Beijing was when she was passing the boarders at Beijing airport, the guy checking her passport noticed that she haven't came back to China for a long time. Mum told the officer that she haven't been back for more than 12 years and the officer was so surprised! He read out my mum's name and said, 'I'll remember you, have fun!'. This was surprising for me too. I thought these officers won't even bother talk to people because they're just doing the repetitive work everyday and won't have the desire to talk. Such a nice officer =)
Welcome home mum =)
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