It’s said that a soldier marches on his stomach and the same can be said about the traveller, everywhere you go there are strange and exotic foods to try, though it wasn’t quite like that in Tibet, Tibet was filled with the familiar, the two staples were yak meat and potatoes, what more could a travelling Irishman want?
Yak was everywhere, when you travelled on the roads of Tibet, they could always be seen roaming the hills and plains and on your plate they were there, fried, as a steak, in a curry, in momos (dumpings), yak yak yak everywhere you look. There was a great moment in the Yak’s Head restaurant in Shigatse when Nami declared a dish as “the best yak ever” – it was lamb! You can only have so much yak!
Xi’an is home to the Terracotta Soldiers, but my main memory of the city will be of food, I met up with Nami again and together in the rain we explored the markets and side-streets in search of our next food high….
We ate in fancy restaurants and with the locals, in food courts and in the greasy spoons beside the train station, in fast-food noodle shops and off the street, we ate and we ate….
We had the famous Sichuan hot pot (of course we weren’t in Sichuan province when we had it but it was good all the same!) which is like the shabu shabu hot pot I had in Taiwan, except in this case the pot is split into two sections, one with water or a mild sauce and the other with a hotter chilli sauce and you can cook your meat and vegetables in either section as you fancy. We also had a lovely mixed spices sesame dip to dip everything in after it was cooked.
Both of us love dumplings and so we sampled quite a few while we were snacking but we also went to a restaurant which boasts 200 different types of dumpings. We ordered a set meal and got to try about 18 different types of dumplings, mainly savoury but some sweet ones as well, we had dumplings filled with pork, duck, chicken, several types of vegetables, egg, peanuts, walnuts, pumpkins and much more, some gorgeous and some just okay but a great way to explore a meal!
After a while though the rain and the grey started getting to me and all this travelling was wearing me out, I was badly in need of a holiday, somewhere warm and sunny, so I flew to Bali…..
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