you are what you eat...

if that saying is true, then i was all sorts of gross in china...and all sorts of good too. here goes (it's a long one, sorry...i just kept finding more and more food pictures!!):

it all started out with the food served on the plane. they even gave us a MENU. i had never been on a flight long enough to serve more than apple juice and peanuts, so this was a treat. and it was actually pretty tasty. all in all, we got 2 meals on each overseas flight. this, the first, was my fav. that's cheesecake in the upper left hand corner. if any of you know me, well, you know cheese cake was a good start to a great vacation.

each morning in hong kong, we started the day by going to a bread/pastry shop. yum! this particular type happened to be called a marron bun. i didn't try it. but, i did try coconut bread, pineapple bread, "donuts" (just a roll with frosting), sausage or ham breads and lots of other stuff.

there are lots of different fruits in china. julia got a dragonfruit courtesy of a lady she took a picture of in a street market. yum!

this is a mangosteen we ate in tuen mun:

this is basically ryan's favorite fruit. it's called a durian. if i remember correctly, he says it smells like b.o. and an onion together? mmm...they are banned on the subways in hong kong. they're thaaaat good.

this jona (and someone's rear end) modeling a delicious fresh-squeezed kiwi drink we had in the mall...i also tried a dragonfruit drink.

this is a yummy mango drink with sago (tapioca-like) pearls at the bottom. pretty delicious. peach popsicles in the forbidden city. the wades are so rich, they got two each.

this was an unexpectedly delicious pineapple/tofu twist frozen yogurt cone. i really got it to say that i had tofu frozen yogurt completely expecting it to be disgusting...and then it had to be good!!

there are also lots of street markets in hong kong that sell all sorts of fruits, vegetables and who knows what. it made me so grateful for the sanitary conditions of my local safeway...and really helped me to understand ryan's anal tendencies when it comes to cooking and cleaning up after cutting poultry and red meat in our home. sorry, ryan...i get it now.

julia and her new friend, the pig.

me and that who-knows-what i was referring to earlier...in macao.

this was an all-too-perfect picture...credit goes to julia.

pig tongues are much longer than maren tongues.

we ate at lots of fun restaurants as well. in hong kong, we went to pizza hut. i have to say, i was not very excited that the other three had chosen PIZZA HUT as their restaurant of choice. come on, folks, we go thousands of miles just to eat at some american restaurant? oh man, i was so wrong. i don't like pizza hut here...way to greasy. but in china, it's great! we had some sort of thousand island dressing pizza with seafood and your regular ham and pineapple. so not greasy and oh so delicious. AND it was a delux restaurant. for a video, click on julia and jona's blog here.

eating cha siu faahn (bbq pork and rice) with choy in the park:

this poor fish didn't know what was coming for him. i think he was happily swimming in his tank when we arrived at the restaurant and look what we did to him! this was on a lovely little island called cheung chau just off lantau island. i ate THE yummiest scallops i have EVER had in the world at this place. three cheers to ryan and jona who each ate one of this fish's eyeballs and to julia ate some of the fish...yay, julia! and three cheers to me because i had to watch it all. i love this picture. it looks like ryan and i hate each other. but we don't. we went to guangzhou in mainland for a day and decided on this restaurant that was listed in our tour book...and they treated us like royalty. they took us to some back room where we were all alone and sat us down at this gigantic table. we were all sitting so far apart from each other! yummy peking duck in beijing after a miserable yet memorable day at the great wall of china. They even gave us a little card saying we they served us their 1,150, 676,350 duck. thank you little duck. xue bi, oh how i love thee. many of you know i went off carbonation when i was 14 for about 3 years. i then had a sip of sprite ('xue bi' in chinese) my junior year and it seriously burned my throat. i can count on one or two fingers the number of times i've had it in these last 10 years...until china. i don't have enough fingers and toes to count how many times i had it in those two weeks, but i sure appreciated it since i couldn't drink the water. we went into our fair share of grocery and convenience stores and found tons of strange stuff...and then, to our surprise, we found our very own safeway O organics brand crackers. many of you also might know of my affinity for mentos (kelli can vouch for me on this one). but...they have so many great flavors in china. grape is ryan's favorite. fuji apple is my new favorite. we also tried black currant, mango, lemon yogurt and some sour kinds. yum, yum and yum. my suitcase weighed a LOT on the way home thanks to these beauties.

and what would a post about food in china be without giving a shout out to our very own mickey-d's. we ate a ton of this stuff and it was our salvation. i never eat it here, but it's like home sweet home there.