Lunch in Guilin
I can’t seem to find my pictures from my first night in Shanghai so I’m moving onto our trip to Guilin! After staying in Shanghai for two nights and visiting the World Expo, we boarded a flight to Guilin to spend a night there. My mom was invited to speak in Guilin and we were hosted by some locals from Guilin’s university.
Guilin is known for their unique scenery; there are mountains, caves, and rivers all going through Guilin. A professor picked us up from the airport and drove us straight to lunch to meet with a board member from the university and then took us around the city after lunch. We went to this restaurant for lunch:
We had a private room for lunch and our own waitresses (it’s very common for people to do business in restaurants so they have a ton of private dining rooms with their own waitresses, restrooms, and sometimes even small kitchens). We started off with some cold dishes – this one is some type of vegetable that was really fibrous:
And bitter melon:
Bitter melon is supposed to cool your body down so it’s eaten a lot during the summer time, but I’m not a big fan of it.
The restaurant specialized in goose, so they prepared a roasted goose for our table:
Another specialty of the restaurant – shrimp prepared two ways:
They remove the body from the head and prepare them differently; you suck on the head that has been sautéed with hot sauce and then you eat the body that’s been boiled in water.
Spare ribs on top of taro chips:
The taro chips absorbed a lot of the spare ribs flavor but still maintained the crunch from deep frying them – yum!
The waitress brought the fish, which was cut up in a very interesting way:
I always love the cold cuts they bring – the most interesting one had asparagus and other vegetables in between the meat:
Goose liver:
Celery sautéed with ginkgo nuts:
Japanese eggplant with green beans:
Bean sprouts with celery and vinegar:
Veggies:
Shrimp sautéed with celery and hot sauce:
Our table:
For dessert, they brought some perfectly shaped buns:
The buns were filled with sugar and egg yolks – a little too sweet for me, but apparently it’s very popular in Guilin:
After lunch, the professor and our driver took us to our hotel so we could rest for a bit before heading on a tour of the sites. Pictures of the caves tomorrow!
