Eating Peking duck in Beijing is a no-brainer. You’ve gotta do it.
However, since it typically involves a whole duck being served over multiple courses, it’s a difficult dish to enjoy solo.
I recently found myself in a food hall of sorts in Beijing, hungry for something a little bit more substantial than the various snacks that most of the vendors were offering up. There was a full fledged restaurant in the back, but the menu was fully Chinese, with no pictures to point at.
There’s an app you can get on your phone called Google Translate, where you can point your camera at something and it’ll translate it on the fly. When I first heard about this, I thought, well, travel has been revolutionized. Then I tried it. It sorta-kinda works, depending on what you point it at, but for some reason when you try it on menus the results tend to be gibberish.
Still, I was desperate enough to give it a shot, and amongst the nonsense was a line that said something about “old noodles.” So I pointed at that and ordered it.
Well, that’s a wrap on Amsterdam (and on Europe!). As usual, here’s a few random photos to close things out.
Thanks to its colonialist history, Surinamese cuisine is quite common in Amsterdam (the history of colonialism is pretty horrifying, but at the very least some good food came out of it. So… glass half full?).
Remember the Guinness Storehouse that I wrote about in Ireland? Well, they have something in Amsterdam called the Heineken Experience that’s pretty much the exact same thing, but with Heineken instead of Guinness.