
Valletta, Malta: I Didn’t See One Maltese Dog But It Was Still Nice
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Shanghai, China: Amazing Vegan Food, Plus My Favorite Buffet Ever
Oh, and if you came here from the previous post just to find out what toon bags are, that’s at the last section, but why would you want to skip all this food before that? Do you SEE how delicious it is? I mean you can’t see deliciousness but just look how good. Dammit I love Shanghai’s food!
Speaking of, before we get to the food:
Because they were takeout containered, the pictures are even less appetizing than my usual ones, and I cannot in good faith share what they looked like outside the restaurant’s preferred plating ideals. You don’t want to see what the beige quinoa fritters looked like in their beige container in the beige-ifying light of our hotel room the next day. Nor do you want to see the salad stuffed into a container that was just too small for its grand size. Both were very good though, and I would love to eat at P&W and try other things. They had a great sounding menu, and I really enjoyed the things I got. They also sent a packet of pita bread in my to-go bag! I guess it came with the patties or the salad, which is awesome. Yippee for bread (so rare in China! I haven’t had bread in so long because most of the bread here is eggy or milky)!
Okay, onto the more important stuff, our two spectacular dinners. First, we went to a fancy (we didn’t know it would be fancy!) vegetarian restaurant with wonderful reviews called Vegetarian Life Style. I like that the front says life style as two different words because I like to think they mean vegetarian life AND vegetarian style, because we are so stylish. I mean just check out the style section of this blog which I literally have not updated in four years lolol. Maybe I will do that soon and write about my extraordinarily unfashionable travel clothes. ANYWAY, the restaurant. It was PACKED and in a very swanky neighborhood, JiangNing, so that was great to see. We weren’t as hungry as we usually are so we didn’t order as much as we usually do, which is a DAMN DIRTY SHAME.
Well, maybe my second stop.
I was not prepared for how beautiful everything about this place was. It was so fancy (we were, again, not dressed appropriately for our tastes but a) no one cared and b) we don’t have nice clothes on us). And the buffet went on FOR MILES. I have never seen such an enormous, gorgeous buffet. Everything was clearly marked with what had egg and what had milk (most of the desserts, which I expected, but not much of the actual food!). I have never eaten so much in my life but still wanted more. Everything was at least good, most things were great, and some was spectacular. Because it’s a ginormous buffet with literally 540030 different dishes, I have no idea what I ate and what’s in these pictures I’m about to send your way, but know that it was wonderful and I can’t wait to go back.

More of St. Petersburg: Random Sights, More Museums, and Peterhof
Like this random street market that was decorated with umbrellas when we were scrambling trying to find umbrellas for sale. No one could reach these to sell to us. So cruel, decorative umbrellas in the rain! This market had a burrito truck, a Dippin’ Dots stand (for real!), and then about 48 matryoshka and wooden whittled goods stands.
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Okay so every statue we saw of Peter the Great (and there are a lot) gives him a tiny Beetlejuice style head! What is up with that? Did he have a tiny head? Because he was really quite tall, right? Poor tiny headed tall man
So St. Petey’s was a great real first-stop on our adventure. It felt very comfortable, without any of the culture shock that we are expecting to come at us in the (very!) near future. It is still very European, which explains that feeling. We would probably be happy to return one day, especially because there is still much to see. We really wanted to do a night boat tour, on many strong recommendations. See, at night, the bridges on all the canals lift up from about 1:45am to maybe just before 4am, so there are boat tours that go around the freed up canals and show off all the lights of the city. It’s supposed to be awesome, but there just wasn’t a night that we could dedicate to being up then because we had such full days planned, we couldn’t sacrifice a whole morning (as we would need to in order to recover from such a night!). So we’re sorry to have missed that, but we did so much sight-seeing that we are happy overall with our visit. And now we have a good reason to return! After Peterhof, we had a great final dinner at Ukrop (read about it here!) before getting on the midnight sleeper train to Moscow. Next post!