Joys of Travel

During our tour in China, our travel agent arranged a traditional Chinese lunch in a private home. The hostess took time to demo Chinese cooking in her kitchen, she also taught us of how to make Chinese dumplings. After finishing the cooking demo, she served 10 delicious dishes for us.

Our travel buddies were making dumplings (I was taking pics, so not in the pics):

dumpling-1

dumpling-2 Like American fast food, buns and dumplings are for breakfast or lunch. Traditionally, the day before Chinese New Year’s Eve, mothers, sisters, cousins, and/or aunties would get together at a large kitchen table making buns and dumplings with various flavors. While making dumplings, they were also exchanging stories and gossips. The kitchen was filled with laughter and wonderful smell of food, a happy place.

Our travel buddies (12 in the group) were from different countries, Australia, England, Greece, Japan, and US, between 20s to 70 years old. Despite the geographic and age differences, we had same goals–traveling, savory, and photographing (our Japanese friend carried 3 different cameras the entire time and our 20 some year old friend had never stopped shooting photos). We had a great time traveling together from Beijing to Xi’an, Guilin, and Shanghai in 12 days 🙂

These were the Chinese buns and dumplings that we had in Shanghai:

buns