A bus tour apparently comes with a tremendous amount of restaurant eating, and we visited restaurants generally twice daily. Sometimes we were arriving at an odd hour and would be the only customers in the restaurant. Almost always, we were greeted at the door by a cadre of uniformed servers, the doors flanked with three or four restaurant employees on either side. Two would hold the doors open for us and usher us in in their best English which in all cases was much better than any of our Chinese. Often these were dressed in lovely silk outfits of the most beautiful colors; the outfits were matching, sometimes red, sometimes yellow, sometimes lime green. At one occasion, all the servers went outside when we were done eating, and they played music on some large drums at the entrance to a hotel high above Zhangjiajie. That was quite a sight to see.I do not believe I will be eating Chinese food again anytime soon, good though it was.......there was just so darn much of it. Most meals were served at a round table, to a group of about ten of us. Each table place would be set with a small plate.....a very small plate......and a pair of chopsticks, with possibly a bowl for soup and perhaps a cup for tea. The size of the plates varied from sandwich size to saucer size. In other words, they were always quite tiny, meant, I suppose, for putting just one or two items on at a time.
Each table was fitted with a lazy susan and the food would come out one dish at a time. You never knew what was coming, nor how much would come thus you would never have any idea how much to eat and of what. Some offerings were very familiar to us and some were completely new. Most of the food was not part of an ensemble dish of any kind, but rather would consist of slices of meat, for example, or a plate of one kind of vegetable or another. Soup never came out first. In fact, when the soup would come, you knew the meal was drawing to a close. Rice would follow this, and then would come the watermelon. Sometimes the first dishes would not be particularly appetizing, and so you would choose from among these, and find the most palatable and have a few more pieces of that just in case there was nothing better coming in the meal. But inevitably an incredibly tasty dish would come out next. Eating too much of what we did not like, and a little bit more of what we did like led to a massive overload of calories, it seemed, leading most of us to skip an occasional meal entirely at one point in the trip. Never at any restaurant did we finish what was brought to us--there was just too much of it.Sometimes we had dumplings and sometimes we had sliced of meat. one of the most unusual things we had was a goose liver jello. this came on the first night and I was thinking after that meal that I might actually lose a little weight in china. we had an unusual corn dish.....the corn was popped and held together with some non sugary substance and pressed into a round pan and cut into pizza like slices for serving. we had a number of various kinds of dumplings at several meals, and these came in shapes and types I had never seen before. I really did not think to take photos of all of these foods until just now, so what you see on the page is what we managed to get just by luck.
Twice we ate in family homes and these were my favorite meals, coming with things i do not ordinarily associate with Chinese food. for example, potatoes and tomatoes. there was a lot of bok choy served and quite a bit of something called winter melon, which is served cooked.
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