粥

Last night we picked up Simon and Joyce from their place and we all went out to eat at a place called chansi xianshige. The specialty is a congee hotpot, basically a rice soup in a big pot over a burner in the middle of the table. Various raw ingredients are ordered and brought to the table and cooked in the congee. We got mostly seafood and vegetables and it was absolutely delicious. It was great to talk with our beijing friends about our trip and about china in general. They advised us to change our Shanghai train tickets from the "T" train to the "D" train as it is much newer, faster and more comfortable. So we are going to stay in Beijing an extra night and leave on the Wednesday morning train instead of the Tuesday overnight train. There's so much to see and do here that an extra day is going to be welcome. It's also another day to practice standard mandarin Chinese as the Shanghai dialect is quite different, and even when they speak mandarin, the accent is and pronounciation can be hard to understand. So we are off to the station to take care of the tickets, then somewhere for lunch....,

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