I ate street food and didn't die!

Contrary to popular belief, there are other types of street food one can buy other than just scorpions and crunchy insects. There’s something called jianbing and it’s delicious!

Let me rewind a little:

The other day, the UF group decided to go to visit the Summer Palace. It was built in 1750 for Emperor Qianlong’s mother. Now it is filled with temples, rowboats in lakes, bridges and lush trees. And it’s a UNESCO World Heritage site! The palace spans 700 acres and a majority of it is underwater. Though this sounds peaceful and relaxing, the walk up the hills to the temples is exhausting. There are many rocks and paths to climb, and in the Beijing heat, it’s rough. We went to the palace midday and the sun was unforgiving. Regardless, we were able to take a some good photos. 

The heat here is more physically draining than mentally draining. When we decided we had seen enough of the palace grounds, we split into groups. One went back to Tsinghua and the other went on an adventure. This adventure included street food and pandas!

It was mid afternoon by now and we were starving, so the Heathers, Christian and I went on a food hunt. We passed by this little kart selling what looked like the Chinese version of a crepe. It’s a crepe with an egg, a fried cracker, bean paste, spicy sauce and a little cilantro. Jianbing is folded up into a square and served burning hot. Christian told us that Jason had recommended we try this, so we did. 

It’s delicious! It was too hot to eat right away and needed maybe five minutes to get to an edible temperature. The cracker was an interesting addition and the sauce wasn’t too spicy. There are many recipes online if you want to make your own!

After refueling Beijing style, the four of us did what you have to do in Beijing: see pandas! We made our way to the zoo, even getting lost and misdirected a few times, but we made it! I was warned that the zoo was sad and not really worth a visit, yet I wanted to go anyway.

The pandas were exciting to see but they were in small confinements. As were the rest of the animals. They looked underfed and bored in comparison to the animals in zoos in America. It was sad and the zoo is a place that you can skip if you don’t have enough time to visit. Overall, I’m happy I got to see some pandas.