We Live In The Country!: A Month in China! Xi'An: Tang Dynasty Show and Foodie Fun!

At the Tang Dynasty Show

Tang Dynasty Show

A Dumpling Banquet!

Jing Jing teaching us to Properly eat soup dumplings!

Tang Dynasty Show

As our month in China was largely a "foodie-centric" trip, this post is about two, fun "foodie" things we did while in Xi'An- where we went primarily to see the Terracotta Warriors (see my previous post here), but which has SO much more to see and do that we both wished we'd had at least a week more to spend there! Our first evening in Xi'An we went to the Tang Dynasty Show and had a Dumpling Banquet! I booked this tour through Viator, as well, (as I again couldn't find out the name of the tour agency until after I had booked...), as a fun way to start out our short stay in Xi'An. Our guide and driver met us at our hotel, from which we went to the opulent, red-and-gold theatre where the Tang Dynasty Show is performed. Prior to the performance we enjoyed a delicious and fun Dumpling Banquet dinner, where we were surprised, yet again, to be the only Westerners present! The dumpling banquet started with an hors d'ouevre plate and a mini-hot pot of soup and tiny dumplings (I got two for "double happiness" and Dan got one for "success"), and featured 3 steamers each of different shaped and pleated dumplings with different fillings: mushroom, pork, chicken, shrimp, veggie, purple sweet potato, etc., and a Totally adorbs and delish duck-filled one that was shaped like a little duck! We also got unlimited boiled pork-filled dumplings, and while they were good, and would have made me happy back in the States, slathered in dipping sauce of chili paste, soy, and vinegar, the others were SO much more delicate, flavorful, and better- and needed no sauces!

We each got a glass of a very mild, warm wine much like Korean Magkoli, as well, and when we sat down for the show we ordered a teapot full of it for 80 RMB and were brought a little side table right by our seats!

Tang Dynasty Show Musician

Seat-side warm Baiju!

Elisse and Dan doin' the Tang Dynasty Thing!

Tang Dynasty Show

The Tang Dynasty Show was excellent, with extremely talented dancers and musicians in opulent period costumes performing a variety of Tang Dynasty dances, such as the "long sleeve scarf" dances, with English explanations on a video screen. The dances clearly showed the influence China had on the other cultures of Asia, notably Thai, as well as Japan. The audience of over 1000 was totally blue-collar Chinese, all with iPhones a-snapping, as they took photos and videos through the entire performance, while munching popcorn! It was Very cool to see 1000 "locals" so enjoying their own historic culture (which does not come cheap, at $50 a ticket...), as I had expected the audience to be only foreign tourists- we only spotted one other, small, Western group in the entire audience! At the conclusion of the performance, as the Chinese audience filed out past us, they got a Huge kick out of our having ordered the tea pot of local booze- and as we weren't able to finish it, Dan poured a good bit of it into the thermos cup of an elderly lady and made her Very happy! Dan then had to shake every man's hand, and we were photographed for a lot of scrapbooks, and told we obviously had a "good heart". :-)

English supra-titles

At the Tang Dynasty Show

The next day we spent with Jasmine of Travel Xian Guide having an excellent full day seeing the Terracotta Warriors and visiting the last Cave Dwellers, as well as having a delicious lunch, walking on the ancient City Wall, and through the Muslim Food Street to the Grand Mosque! See my previous post on that great day here).
Our last evening in Xi'An we we walked the 2k from our hotel, the lovely Xi'An Hilton, up to the Xi'An Fire Station to meet our "LostPlate" Foodie Tour guide, Rosemary (Jing Jing).

At the Xi'An Fire Station...

The three of us set off in a Lost Plate Tuk-Tuk driven by our charming, Hijab-swathed driver, to try a selection of Xi'An specialties around town. Our first stops were in the famous Muslim Quarter, which we had walked through the day before with Jasmine, where we began the evening enjoying very tasty skewers of spicy BBQ beef seasoned with pepper, cumin, and fennel, at a little side-street stall/restaurant, seated on low tables and small plastic stools as in Vietnam. The platter of skewers was served with a thick, crusty flatbread, so you could make little "sandwiches" out of the meat and bread!

Dan and Jing Jing and BBQ!

Xi'An BBQ!

Then we went to another place for wonderful Xi'An Soup Dumplings (that really Are different from the Shanghai ones!), that Rosemary/Jing Jing taught us how to eat properly, first lifting one dumpling gently, with chopsticks, onto our spoon, then biting a small hole in the side and blowing into the filling to cool it down sufficiently, before slurping the soup out, and then dipping the beef-filled dumpling into the glorious sauce of chilies, soy, and vinegar, and (finally!) eating it! We thus managed not to cover ourselves and the table with soup, as usually happens when one eats soup dumplings, and Jing Jing should seriously market her expert instruction as a YouTube tutorial, entitled "Eating Soup Dumplings 101"! (Note to Lost Plate: I will be DELIGHTED for you to return us to China so I can create this tutorial!) We also had a thick, rich, and spicy egg drop soup with veggies- including, surprisingly for us- tomatoes, My Favorite Fungus, and a brown-sugar-sweetened celebratory "8 Treasure Soup" with jujubes, Hawthorne berries, lotus seeds, lily root, rose petal jam, and peanuts! I have to say that the soup dumplings were our fave, and I Longed to take a "doggy bag" of them back to the hotel!

First you CAREFULLY lift the dumpling into your spoon...

Then you bite a tiny hole in the dumpling...

How To Eat Soup Dumplings 101 with Jing Jing!

At my request, Jing Jing then stopped at a spice shop so we could buy the dried local Xi'An red and "numbing" peppers- which I want to compare with what we will hopefully get in Chengdu- and I learned, first hand, that Xi'An 'numbing pepper' is a wild, foodie experience of the first stripe! :-)

Spice Shop

Then we went to the small restaurant/street stall that has served what is obviously, from the lines and full tables in the tiny off-the-street stall, Xi'An's fave evening snack for 60 years: their family's secret recipe for "steamed beef": a bowl of beef and rice, with a bit of soft fat, served with a round of flatbread, and eaten with nibbles of raw garlic!

The street food that made Xi'An famous!

At Xi'An's most poplar street food restaurant

The Muslim Food Street after dark

Hi!

Or next stop was a non-Muslim restaurant in town for Xi'An's delish and unique, wide, flat, cold, spicy rice noodles, which also contained strips of pure gluten (which I thought were tofu!), and "Xi'An Hamburger", tasty shredded pork served inside a crisp and flaky flat-bread.

Our final foodie stop was a Muslim Noodle Shop that serves a spinach noodle bowl (mostly to male laborers) that is the closest thing we've ever had to Italian pasta in China: thick green spinach noodles (think: fettuccine), served in a spicy sauce with potatoes, bean sprouts, and other veggies! By this point in the evening, having not even finished most of the delicious dishes we had so enjoyed, we were were Totally Stuffed! Remember: Do NOT eat before you do a food tour!!!

Xi'An Green Fettuccine!

Our Tuk-Tuk driver changed places with her husband, and he took us to the last stop of our tour: Xi'An's hip microbrewery, The Near Wall Bar, where we had a flight of their very good beers and then a pint of our choice apiece- a banana-scented light beer for me, and a tasty, coffee-ish "cream stout" for Dan. We were, again, the only "Westerners" in the place, and it was fun to hang out with the "locals"!

Our Lost Plate Tuk-Tuk!

At the Near Wall Bar and Brewery

In the Near Wall Bar and Brewery

Dan and our Beer Flights at Near Wall

We let Jing Jing go on home, and then, following her suggestion, as that night was the first night of the Lantern Festival, when the old city wall and ramparts, as well as the rest of the city, are illuminated with a million lights, we walked outside... and were Absolutely Blown Away by the Neon Porn that is Xi'An After Dark! Xi'An made The Ginza, Times Square, and basically everything else, look like a totally amateurish joke! There is really no way to adequately describe it- it's a city-wide, awe-inspiring, and totally ga-ga epic of lights, on an absolutely fantastic and unbelievably grand scale!

The lights of Xi'An!

We walked down one of Xi'An's innumerable 8-lane-wide designer-label shopping streets to the Bell Tower... and then, not knowing where the hell we were, began to try to hail a cab to get back to the Hilton... We did the underpass and walked up and down and round and round... but all the passing cabs were occupied, lights on or no lights on. Dan finally (and really smartly) managed to hail us a Tuk-Tuk, and didn't even negotiate! We paid our driver 50 RMB ($9) for what was, at max, a 12 RMB ($2) ride (taxis start in Xi'An at 8.50 RMB)- and he only had it die on him once- pulling over to hook up the second fuel tank. But we got home safe, we were happy, and he was overjoyed, so it was a win-win all around!