Some experience to share..

The food and Restaurant

In Beijing, I am not kidding you but you really need a tour guide to help you select the food from the menu! There was no English on the menu and you gonna have a really rough time to select what food you want to eat. Its even more difficult when none of the waiters or the waitresses knew any English, not even simple english. We have been to a number muslim restaurants and the plus signs of experiencing these restaurants were the food was out of this world. They were simply delicious amid too oily for some people. They used lots of oil to cook but the food was stunning.

Good idea also to try to use chopsticks for the sake of experience. Its not easy to eat rice with chopsticks though but what we can observed from our tour guide you have to put your mouth closer to the bowl in order for the rice to reach your mouth hehehe. Eating noodles, vegetables or slices of chicken or beef was a bit easier as long as you were being patient and willing to take longer to finish your food. You will notice also most chicken are boneless I guess this is the norm so that it will be easier to pick up using the chopsticks.

Another thing I noticed also is while having your meal you wont be served with water only a pot of hot tea with tiny weeny cups. There was variety of tea to taste from. But if you are used to eating your meals with water or drink by the side, better to bring your own water!. And I am not sure if drinks were in the menu also since all our food was ordered by our tour guides and we didn’t know whats in the menu.

We also noticed most restaurants in Beijing served egg soup. We never failed to have this in our menu. I think this is the main soup in Beijing, but it was rather nice though.

Shanghai has less number of muslim restaurants but the restaurants we did go to was very nice and the food was splendid. The best one was in Nanjing road where it was situated on the 10th floor. The service was a bit slow but the tour guide asked us to select our own food, the menu was in Chinese with some English. It was a big restaurant I think it occupied the whole of 10th floor so its rather impressive. The surrounding was nice but as usual there were a lot of people.

The Hotel

You really need a hired a reliable transportation to reach your hotel, especially if you reached Beijing late at night like we did. Our trip was much easier to reach destination when the van with the driver and tour guide were already waiting for us at the airport to take us to the hotel. We didn’t have to go through the horror of talking to a taxi driver and explained to him where our hotel was. I heard it can be nightmare since most of the taxi drivers do not know how to speak English. But as a word of warning and caution, if you have to take your own transport, it must be a must to have the name of your hotel written in Chinese characters so all you have to do is to show the paper to your taxi drivers and pray that he will bring you to the correct destination.

Our hotel is a 3 star hotel, very simple, basic but met out satisfaction. Afterall we didn’t spend much time in the hotel anyway, we left the hotel at 8.30am in the morning for breakfast and sight seeing and didn’t come back to hotel until about 8.00pm in the evening. So basically we were in the hotel for our slumber, shower and changed our clothings only. The hotel was ok, its clean but a bit small for 3 people. The room was a bit dark due to not enough lighting but it had all the necessity you would ever need, it has hot water, tea/coffee making facilities, slippers, fridge, tv and most importantly a normal toilet bowl and not the squatting one. We didn’t complain about the hotel in fact we enjoyed what we saw. We were not offending the Chinese people but the English they used were rather hilarious but we salute them for trying to come up with a good English with anything. It meant they really looked after their tourists!

Our hotel in Shanghai was spacious and airy. It had 3 beds but still there was enough space for the 3 of us. The toilet and washroom was ok, clean and it has a beautiful wash basin. It was situated in a residential area so there were a lot of apartments around us. We came to know most Chinese living in the city lived in apartment buildings like people in Singapore. Again the hotel met our expectation.