travels

It's been one month and 16 days since I moved...and I've had a whole of 4 days to myself in the apartment. As a result, I have little to update on about life in Shanghai! But, I do have some pretty cool photos of Beijing. :) Jeff took me to a super-cool restaurant in Beijing, which has now become one of my favorites in china. It's called The Orchard. It's way out on the outer edge of the city, in a relatively unpopulated area.


The restaurant itself is a renovated old-Beijing-style 四合院 (si he yuan)...meaning, it's in the shape of a square, with an atrium in the middle. The seating rooms are on the four sides of the house.

Here's the interesting part. It's an italian restaurant. The place is surrounded by an orchard, and a garden. All of the ingredients are fresh, the vegetables grown on their property. The house is renovated to look like an old Italian villa, with a pond and gazebo in the back. Very cute, very quaint, and very good food! :)

Getting there was quite an experience as well. Maybe the last time I was there, I was in too much of a jet-lagged fuzz...but this time, something struck me as really odd. Straight after turning off of the main road, we passed into a residential area that was in obvious need of repair, and the people were living in something close to poverty. Families were running small shops along the street-side. Directly across the street, behind the chainlink fence, was a lush, wide expanse of a golf course... The existence of these two very different lifestyles side-by-side reminded me how the rest of China really is. Being in the center of the massive metropolis' of Beijing and Shanghai, it's easy to forget how very poor the majority of the population is. I can only imagine what those people thought about the absolute waste of space, water, and energy required to maintain that golf course...