We had enough

Chinese food.

On our vacation anyway.

 I try to document what we eat but don't always remember......This was at the end of the meal.  The tour guide would order food for us without asking what we might like......In the future If we ever take another trip with a private guide I will try to be more active in ordering our food....Like no soup, we didn't eat any of the soups and they always got us one.  They did seem to always order Kung Pao Chicken which we do like.  There is such waste, usually they ordered us 5 dishes of food, we never eat that much in a meal.

This is the soup we didn't eat.  Very fatty pork and not very tasty.  

 The Kung Pao, almost gone.  That is  chopsticks at the top of the picture coming for another morsel.
We had plenty of practice with chopsticks!!  Tons of HOT peppers!

 Food on the hoof or perhaps their claws.....we didn't eat any pheasant but could have.  This was in an area of restaurants at Mt. Emei when we went walking around looking for dinner (dinner wasn't included in the tour so we were on our own.)
Rabbits too and little squirmy crawfish and even snails.  Tell them what you want and they will cook it up.

 Sometimes we even had our own rooms in the restaurants.  A very common practice here among the Chinese.  It was always amusing because the table are meant for much bigger groups than three.  I guess we had 6 dishes at this one plus a huge bowl of rice.

 This strange, board like substance was for sale in many places in Emeishan.  I asked the guide about it the next day and he said it is some type of plant substance...you get that sort of answer when there is no easy translation or they don't know what it is.


So for lunch, seven dishes, he ordered us some.  It must be some sort of  fungus.  I think it took on the flavor of what it was cooked in/with.   The guide says he doesn't like it.

 It was  spongy and no longer dry as in the above shot.  They cut it into bite size chunks and cooked it up with a bunch of stuff.  I thought it was pretty tasty, Mike didn't really like it.  I wonder if there is any other way to prepare it?  Who was the first person to try it?  In its dried state it looks like dried up sea sponge.

I didn't get pictures on the cruise as it was served buffet style and I didn't eat the Chinese food.  Made do with the bit of western fare they provided........

Love, fondly,sincerely,

Zaijian,

Ramona