We Live In The Country!: A Month In China! Beijing: The Forbidden City and a Tale of Two Ducks!

The Forbidden City

Our palatial Chairman's Suite at the Beijing Hotel NUO!

Meat-on-a-Stick at Wangfujing!

In honor of our Third Second Honeymoon (which I had emailed them about when I booked...), the gorgeous and historic Beijing Hotel NUO (originally Raffles) gave us an extraordinary upgrade to their magnificent "Chairman's Suite"! Located in the original heritage building, the only thing I can compare this extraordinary suite to is the 1930's Palace we visited in Dalat, Vietnam! With a gorgeous, full living/dining room of velvet upholstered furniture and pillows, velvet and damask drapes, and Chinese carpets in pinks and oranges and beiges, our suite was filled with original art and ceramics, and boasted a palatial full bath as well as a half bath, a huge bedroom with a magnificent, gilded, four-poster bed festooned with a heart of romantic towel swans, a "writer's nook", an espresso machine and pods, a wet bar, and my dream 'fainting sofa', upholstered in beige leather and raised velvet flowers! It even had a double-doored balcony overlooking Chang'an Avenue, but, and sadly, they'd locked all the doors to it! :-( This Really bummed me out, as I Badly wanted to go out on the balcony off our bedroom and wave, like Eva Peron, at my comrades! :-) They even gave us a welcome plate with a selection of lovely pastries! Although we booked their least expensive room- never expecting the amazing upgrade- the NUO was our one hotel "splurge" on this trip, and SO worth it! The service was impeccable, the Concierges wonderful, the location excellent, the Writer's Bar delightful, and our suite was over-the-top fabulous! And it wasn't a terribly expensive splurge, all things considered: our four nights at the NUO cost about $620- a true steal for a hotel of this caliber.

This is the life! At the Hotel NUO Beijing

Hotel NUO Beijing

Our gorgeous bedroom in the Chairman's Suite at the Hotel NUO

Towel swans for the Honeymooners!

The Hotel NUO's welcome gift...

Me, fainting on my Fainting Sofa!

"High and Low" is our motto: Dan and I love street food and markets, and having read about Beijing's many famous "food streets", for our first night in Beijing I had booked a tour through Viator that would take us to several of them, including the famous Wangfujing Street Food Market, and the Pipe Hutong neighborhood. Unfortunately our tour guide never turned up. :-( This was the only tour mess-up of the whole trip (which is pretty amazing, given that I'd never used Viator or any of the tour companies), but it was frustrating, all the same. For over an hour the hotel's diligent and helpful Concierge (see my "tips" post on why you want to stay in Really Good Hotels: http://southernwestvirginia.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-month-in-china-part-1-tips-for-china.html) phoned again and again: the tour guide's phone was "no longer in service", and none of Viator's supposedly 24/7 Customer Service numbers would connect- not the US, Australia, or "international" one. While Viator refunded my money immediately once I was finally able to email them several days later, that night it did us no good, and not being able to reach either the tour guide or Viator was very aggravating.

Fortunately, the NUO is perfectly situated near the Forbidden City, shopping pedestrian streets, and other Beijing fun, and with a little guidance from our helpful Concierge we walked basically around the corner to the Wangfujing Street Food Market, and made a fun and yummy dinner from the myriad street food stalls: salty crunchy scorpions on a stick to start (had to- it's one of Wangfujing's most famous treats!), followed by a bean sprout crepe roll, grilled meat-on-a-stick, spicy Muslim lamb-on-a-stick (this year's trendy food throughout China), deep fried prawns-on-a-stick, fried buns, a little tray of dumplings, delish fried octopus-on-a-stick, and, finally, a really excellent Peking Duck Crepe! I was honestly surprised at how delicious the Peking Duck Crepe was, and thought it would be interesting to compare it to the fancy Peking Duck we were to have the next night at the Duck de Chine restaurant, famed for having some of the The best Peking Duck in the city... Wangfujing is a trip and a half; if you don't like the crush of crowds it's not for you! I had read that it's considered a "tourist" food street by in-the-know locals and ex-pats, and that there are others throughout the city that are supposedly better and more "authentic", but they were far and Wangfujing was near, and Wangfujing won! What we saw was that Wangfujing is Very popular; it was absolutely packed to the gills with thousands of hungry eaters! Perhaps they were all tourists (everyone seemed to be taking iPhone selfies eating scorpions-on-a-stick...), but the gazillion possible-tourists were ALL Chinese!

Scorpions-on-aAtick!

Doing so many walking tours during our month in China really gave us Quite the work out- I know I walked more on this trip than in the entire past year! The smartest investment I made for this trip was scoring a pair of fur-lined UGG booties on eBay for $32. Even though I prefer heels, being 4'9" tall, and frankly hate wearing flats which make me feel short and dumpy LOL, the UGGs were great, and perfect for this trip. I wore them almost every day, and they were comfortable on our mile-long walks, and kept my tootsies toasty, even in the icy cold of Harbin!

Wangfjuing Food Street Gate

Bean-Sprout Crepes

Shvarma (lamb)

Octopus-on-a-Stick

Young artisans at work...

"Tourists" at Wanfujing...

Artful Hotdogs!

Meat-on-a-Stick!

Wangfujing Food Street

Things that make me laugh...

Dan buying us Prawns-on-a-Stick!

Buns and Crabs...

Dumplings!

Peking Duck Crepes!

We wandered down one of the many little side streets and watched an artisan wearing a Mandarin hat glass-blow a delicate, beautiful animal from spun sugar for a delighted little girl who helped him blow it through a straw. He then painted a tender face on it with colored sugar... and the whole thing was so lovely to watch that it made me cry...

Making a blown-sugar horse...

Painting a sugar-face on the little horse...

Dan and I both got pooped long before we thought we would, and waddled back to the NUO to have another glass of fine Chinese wine at their Writer's Bar, with the Really Nice Barman who we happily tipped... and then up for a glorious soak in our suite's tub...

A great Chinese Red at the NUO...

The next morning we walked for Miles and Miles through the one-of-a-kind Forbidden City with our delightful and extremely knowledgeable guide from WikiBeijing Tours. This was also a tour I had booked via Viator/TripAdvisor (after OCD reading about Every tour in the city, LOL), as I couldn't find out the name of the tour agency until after I had booked! What was unique about this tour was that it was the ONLY one that included lunch in the historic Ice House Restaurant, the only restaurant in the Forbidden City! Together with our guide, we saw the clock, porcelain, and gem/gold exhibitions (I honestly don't think I've Ever seen solid gold vessels that big before...), many of the squares and pavilions, and the gorgeous, royal, golden-yellow porcelain roof tiles, with their finely detailed rows of animals perched on each corner, and learned about them...

We also learned that the famous Opera House (photo below) was- for the first time in 100 years!- closed to the public in honor of President Trump's recent visit, so he could enjoy a special performance of the Opera there! This was truly a great honor, one not bestowed on ANY OTHER PRESIDENT FOR THE LAST 100 YEARS- and one that (sadly) the lamestream fake-news USA media failed to cover...

Another thing we learned about was the famous Zen Concubine Well and the sad story of Imperial Consort Zhen: https://www.chinahighlights.com/beijing/forbidden-city/zhen-concubine-well.htm The well (photo below), is located inside the Zhenshun Gate, north of the Ningshou Palace in the Imperial Palace of Beijing. In 1887, the Guangxu Emperor, having become alienated from Empress Longyu, fell in love with the (kind and smart) Zhenfei ("Imperial Consort Zhen"). As Zhenfei politically sympathized and supported the Guangxu Emperor's political reforms, she got the emperor's favor, but, at the same time, she was hated by the Empress Dowager Cixi. In 1898, Cixi assumed power again and confined poor Zhenfei to a little yard behind the Jingqi Pavilion, forbidding her to see the Guangxu Emperor. Zhenfei's cold palace was in a little yard in the south-east corner of the Imperial Palace. Absolutely isolated from the outside world, she was only given some food through the crevice of the door, so she became thinner and thinner, day by day. In 1900, the Eight-Power Allied Forces broke into the city of Beijing, and the Empress Dowager seized the Guangxu Emperor and fled to Xi'an- after she first killed Zhenfei. In 1901, the Emperor and Empress Dowager returned to Beijing. Zhenfei was given the posthumous title of Senior Imperial Concubine, and her family was allowed to salvage her body from the well. Her body was temporarily sheltered in a coffin in the western suburbs and was later buried in the Congling Tombs of the Western Qing Tombs. After the Xuantong Emperor abdicated at the end of the Qing Dynasty, Zhenfei's elder sister, Jinfei, created a small mourning hall for Zhenfei in the east room of the Huaiyuan Hall to the north of the well. Inside, a memorial tablet was set up as a sign of mourning...

Dan in the Forbidden City...

Beautiful things...

The Opera House, where President Trump was recently feted

An exquisite carving of coal mining...

Detail of the coal miners...

The famous Zen Concubine Well

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We then went for a lovely, light lunch of beef, mushrooms, rice, salads, and tasty date and flower teas at the Ice House Restaurant, a reservation-needed, government-run restaurant (hence the rather take-it-or-leave-it service LOL), that is the ONLY restaurant in the Forbidden City, and is actually in the original and historic stone-walled ice storehouse! Tricked out with clever "ice cube" tables and "ice" chandeliers, it's truly a special, and "Chinese Only" restaurant, as it appears nowhere on the internet except on this one tour! While there are many tours of the Forbidden City, we highly recommend this WikiBeijing Tour, as it's the ONLY one that includes dining in the Ice House!

At the Ice House Restaurant

Lunch in the Ice House!

After lunch we continued to tour the Forbidden City, and when we left, we were given lovely little souvenirs of our day: two small snuff bottles with our names painted inside!

Our names being painted inside our snuff bottles!

Our little souvenir snuff bottles!

With a little help from our wonderful guide, we managed to score our Mao-era winter Red Star Army hats (which EVERY Chinese person is wearing this season, "nostalgia de la boue" for Mao and the Cultural Revolution having made it a hip and trendy style-statement... LOL), on the street, for the Chinese-Only price of 20 RMB ($3) each. We then took her on a wild Hutong (historic neighborhood) distillery goose chase, trying (unsuccessfully) to find the Capital Distillery and Baiju Bar, a very cool and chic-sounding place I'd read about online. After 2 Didi Taxis and miles of walking thru the Hutongs with the Chinese equivalent of Google Maps, we finally found a Swiss ex-pat who guided us to where it had been; the Distillery Bar apparently moved and then closed, thanks to Beijing's officials literally walling up the Hutongs... :-( Pooped and tired- and a tad disappointed, too- boo-boo really wanted to find that distillery!- we took the Metro back to the NUO (easy-peasy, cheap, and clean, just like in Shanghai), dressed up and got our "second wind", and went out for a fine and elegant Peking Duck dinner ($100 total) at Duck de Chine, served with glasses of their signature "1949" wine. Peking Duck has been around since the late Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), and it's not just (or even really) about the meat- it's about the skin! Each place puts it own spin on the dish, but the basic premise is succulent slices of specially-bred duck and its crispy skin, (made by pumping air under the skin, cooking, glazing, and then hanging and drying the birds before roasting them!), wrapped in thin pancakes, and served with scallions and a sweet bean or hoisin sauce. Having Peking Duck in Peking being a non-negotiable issue for me (LOL), I'd read reviews of all the top-rated Peking Duck restaurants in Beijing... and had no clue which one to choose! As we couldn't try them all and compare (now That's an idea for a trip...), it kind of boiled down to a toss-up between DaDong and Duck de Chine. I wound up choosing Duck de Chine, and the Hotel NUO was kind enough to make a reservation for us. It was very good, with table-side duck-carving by a skilled chef, and a hostess who prepared the sauces and showed us how to create the crepes and little sandwiches... but their clean-your-table-off-the-second-you-stop-eating service was totally wrong for a restaurant of this level, and, frankly, the Wangfujing street-stall Peking Duck was almost as good! It was So good, in fact, that we went back to Wangfujing again on another day just to get some! (Too late, I learned that two notable, historic restaurants for Peking Duck are Quanjude and Bianyifang, both centuries-old establishments, and each with their own style: Quanjude is known for using the hung-oven roasting method, while Bianyifang uses the oldest technique of closed-oven roasting. Anyone want to send me back to Beijing on a mission to sample Peking Duck all over the city and write about it???)