Arrival in Beijing

When we stepped off the plane in Beijing, we immediately felt the
stifling heat. We took a train that seemed very new from the airport
to the city, and then a cab to what we thought was the area near our
hotel. It's in a hutong, which is a little street with old fashioned
one-story buildings. We wandered down the street we thought the hotel
was on, but the numbers seemed to skip the address we were looking
for. Eventually, we went in a little cafe and pointed to the address
in our guidebook, and a very nice young man led us through a tiny
winding alley until we found the hotel. Hutongs twist and
turn in all directions.

Our hotel seems not to have changed much from the single story house
it was originally. It has small rooms and a courtyard with couches, a
little koi pond/fountain, and a tree growing through the greenhouse-
like ceiling. Oh yeah, and a puppy and a talking bird.

We asked the nice lady at the front desk for a dinner recommendation,
and she wrote the name of a couple "barbecue" places down the road.
The first one we came to whose characters we could identify on the
sign was very small and appeared to only have Chinese customers. The
menu had Chinese and English as well as pictures, so we had an easy
time avoiding what looked like a whole live frog. We ordered shrimp
and pickled-pepper-flavored catfish.

Before long, a guy came to our table with a huge live catfish in a
net. As he and a waitress tried to ask us something in a combination
of Chinese and very limited English, the fish flopped out of the net
and onto the floor! As the waitress tried to kick the fish back into
the net, we gathered they were just seeking our approval. The kicking
and the dirty floor notwithstanding, we gave our approval, and
canceled the shrimp because the fish was so big.

It was brought back out still whole (but motionless this time) in what
seemed like just a few minutes, in a large pan of dark boiling broth
with ginger, garlic, pickled peppers and other veggies. We awkwardly
picked pieces of meat off with our chopsticks, and once we finally dug
in, it was really tasty!