Art School Restaurant: Fine (in both senses of the word) Dining in Liverpool

Remember a few weeks ago I was complaining about something or other, as I do, and got scared that I wouldn’t be able to find vegan dumplings in China, the one thing that would make it all worth it? Haha maybe dumplings aren’t that powerful but they are amazing and I had so many dumplings, guys. We even went to a place just called Vegetarian Dumpling. Twice. The food in Beijing was incredible, and I would happily go back there to hit more of the places on my list. After the boring food of Siberia and Mongolia, China so far has been a food paradise. There’s enough English spoken in Beijing that finding out what was vegan at regular restaurants was pretty simple, but when there are so many all vegan 0r vegetarian restaurants to try, why even bother elsewhere? 

As soon as we got to Beijing, we walked from our hotel to one of the SUHU Vegetarian Tiger locations, the one in the Fullink Plaza. We walked at least an hour (we really wanted to move and not get on another train by taking the strong metro system immediately), so by the time we arrived we were super hungry and ready to pounce like the titular tiger but on vegan food. It was a weird time because we landed in the city in the afternoon, so we got to SUHU at about 4pm. Luckily they don’t close in between regular meal times, like so many restaurants in China do. However, it was super awkward because 99% of their numerous staff was sleeping at tables with curtains drawn around them. I thought only the Spanish napped in the afternoon while still at work! The restaurant is giant, and very nice, but seeing all these sleeping workers and trying not to bother them was hilariously weird. Whatever, I’m just glad someone was awake to let us in and cook for us, because this is one of my favorite restaurants, anywhere. 

Given how tired I was after the train and the super loud Canadians I had to deal with, trying to choose what to order from the NEVERENDING MENU was actually stressful. Amazingly lucky, but stressful! Not only was there a big coffee-table-book style menu measuring 13×15 inches with beautiful full size pictures of everything, but they had a second smaller menu with even more house specialies. Ahh it was too much choice! And, even though it says Vegetarian right in the name, and on HappyCow it’s listed as a vegetarian not a vegan restaurant, the About page of the menu says they don’t use dairy or eggs, so like, maybe there’s some honey in some desserts but that doesn’t help me decide what food to order! How do people without special diets order at regular restaurants?! How do you know what you want if there’s not just one vegan option? 

We decided before we ordered that we would come back another day, which took a lot of the pressure off. First of all, I needed to get a toon dish, because Jojo raved about toon. I chose bean curd ‘noodles’ (like fettuccine-shaped strips I’ve seen everywhere in China) mixed with the delicate green leaf that I learned was toon. I had no idea! It’s like a little green sprout (little green ghouls mannn!) and it’s usually eaten raw so sign me up. This was a perfect dish for me after all this travel – the very mild freshness of toon mixed with the protein-packed bean curd to make a great starter salad. Definitely the kind of thing I would eat every day!

We next tried one of the famed vegetarian eel dishes. I was surprised to see how tiny the portion was, considering how the other plates were pretty big, but considering how much food we ordered, it was for the best (although for the price, it’s kind of a dick move). The eel did not disappoint! It’s been a minute since I’ve had real eel, so my memory is hazy, but it tasted as much like the real thing as I’d want! Caramelized slightly sweet skin and that really good fishy-but-not-gross-fishy flavor and a pretty spot-on texture, so I was a fan of this dish. Maybe I do want more…in the past…however that works.  

Next we tried a simple but delicious noodle dish, with glass noodles, spiralized and marinated vegetables of all/indiscriminate sorts, tofu skin, peanuts, mushrooms, and sesame seeds and oil. It was so yummy! And, of course, because they had dumplings on the menu, I had to get them! I got the Shanghai style, which are a little soupier (but not as soupy as legit soup dumplings which I really want to find vegan version of SOMETIME ughh. These were I think cabbage and miscellaneous other veg. I had been in China for like 3 hours and hadn’t had dumplings yet; I had a quota to fulfill! They were good! Are any dumplings ever bad?? Ahhh love them. 

The craziest thing we ordered at SUHU was the purple yam. I know you’re thinking, like, okay, that’s just what most people think are sweet potatoes, what’s the big deal. Well just look at how it was served: 

Can you even believe that that whipped cream looking business comes from a tuber? The whipped yam was mixed with a little sugar and a little magic and drizzled with blueberry sauce. It was SO good. It tasted like cheesecake, actually, but not in a disgusting cheesecake way, in an amaaazing way. Literally the only problem with this was that three fluffy clouds of it were too many. It’s so filling and rich-seeming that it’s hard to eat a lot of. But it was so delicious! 

On our other visit, we ordered much more conservatively. Well, not much. Actually, maybe not at all. We never do. For my requisite green vegetable, I got this lightly sauteed dish of what I want to say are pea shoots, though it was a lot more sturdy of a stem than I’m used to with those – in a good way, they kept some bite and weren’t mushy. Very good! The mildness of this dish was necessary to combat the incredible heat of our tofu dish. 

The tofu dish was incredible – dense (obviously pressed, good job!) hard little cubes of tofu covered in a spicy garlicky black sauce, with beans (beans!) of various sorts, a few small-cut vegetables, and most of all, CHILI and other peppers that made it suuuper spicy! We like spicy food (and are super excited for Sichuan province) so this was awesome. And despite the air conditioning in the restaurant, we were actually sweating and had to blow our noses a lot while eating it! Haha so fun! 

Less fun was our Singapore noodle dish, which on the menu looked like a good plate of noodles and accompaniment but in reality was a bowl of broth with noodles (and lots of chilis!) in it! We didn’t order soup! It was fine, just a little bit not what we wanted. 

Obviously, I couldn’t go a meal without ordering dumplings, so this time I got the regular steamed dumplings, which were great, as all dumplings are. The two different colors had slightly different tangs to them but still it was mostly a game of cabbage, tofu, and some other standard dumpling stuff. I packed up most of these for the train to Shanghai we took later that last night, and they were perfect train food. 

I wanted to order the hatcake that Jojo recommended, but for some reason my brain wanted me to order sesame buns to save for dessert later. I assumed they were the sweet, super chewy type of sesame bun I love from Chinatowns the world over, but instead they were buttery and flaky, falling apart in your mouth. Which sounds amazing, I know, and they were good, but I just don’t really like buttery and flaky, I like chewy. Regardless, SUHU was incredible and if I’m ever back in Beijing it would probably be my first stop. 

Well, it might be my second stop. Another place I absolutely adored was the well-named Vegetarian Dumpling, which was only 15 minutes walk from our hotel and so easy to get to that I went myself (without google maps or cell access at all!) once. The menu has English translations, the dumpling list has eggs next to the stuff that has eggs, it has good wifi, and it was full of actual Chinese people. All wins! 

The number of dumplings without the egg symbol is a bit limited, but they all still sounded great so we chose three. I read a lot about how Vegetarian Dumpling makes you order a double order of each kind you want, so 10 dumplings instead of the 5 that come in one order. I said, 1) if that was the case why don’t they just make the order size 10? and b) if it is true/so stupid then we will just cross one of the three we chose off!

The waitress came, looked at our order form (you check off what dishes you want and how many of them), and changed all the 1’s we put next to the dumplings into 2’s. So, it is true, and they are not just changing the official order size and price which makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE, but anyway, in more important news, we idiots could not decide what dumpling to cross off because they all sounded good so we just said FORGET IT BRING US ALL 30 DUMPLINGS. 30 dumplings is a lot, guys. 
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And guess what, having a limited number of vegan dumpling choices did not make ordering here any easier, because they still had an EPIC long menu of regular Chinese food! Ahhhh it looked just as good if not better than SUHU. We decided on a sauteed green vegetable with beans (BEANS!), plus one of their advertised (on the wall) specialties – a stewed meatball and cabbage (or other similar green) dish. SO MUCH FOOD. And it was all great. 

AHHH SO MANY DUMPLINGS! They were all great too. We got the cabbage and peanut, which was probably the weakest of the three but hey still a dumpling; the carrot, cucumber, black mushroom, black fungus (how’s that different) and vermicelli kind, which was great; and the sweet and sour shredded potato option, which somehow was the best of the three. SO interesting and great! You’d think that after struggling to eat 15 dumplings each I would be sooo over them by now, but that lasted approximately 12 hours. 

The stewed meatball dish we got was one of the best things we ate in Beijing. It had NO business being that incredible. So delicious! Oh man! And the greens and beans were great too, if standard, but that’s what I want out of my greens usually. 

I was ecstatic to see cucumber juice on the list of fresh juices, the only non-fruit (well they have carrot but that doesn’t count) option. I ordered it and was SO happy to discover that it really was JUST cucumber juice! No mixing with apple or other bullshit that every non-Chinese juice place does! It was sooo good. I would soon learn that plain cucumber juice is hella prevalent all over China! Score! 

Z ordered a drink called ‘syrup of plum’ out of sheer curiosity. It was not delicious. 
I went back another night and had an incredible homestyle tofu dish, cooked and served in a black clay pot that DID NOT COOL OFF. I also had this raw cabbage and peanut salad that was just perfection. 

The tofu dish was my very first dish that would fall under the ‘gelatinous’ category of Chinese cuisine! I don’t know how they did it or why but it was good and not a gross consistency as I’d expect! The cabbage salad was a perfect food for me. The dressing was light and soo delicious, very fresh herb-y and if I didn’t have such a bastardized palette I’d tell you which herbs. 

Did I…did I not get dumplings this time??? What’s wrong with me! 

I love Vegetarian Dumpling so much. It was pretty darn cheap, too, for SOOO much food. I wish they had one closer to me. 

Another vegetarian restaurant we went to was Baihe Lily. This was not our first choice – after seeing the Lama and Confucian Temples, we wanted to go to a very closeby veg restaurant called Xu Xiang Zhai Vegetarian that was in the book and highly recommended. It sounded amazing! We got there, and it was NO LONGER IN EXISTENCE. BOOOO. The closest veg restaurant we could find on Google (we were hangry, no time to travel to something too far) was Baihe Lily. The food was good, but I can’t recommend it really because it’s super overpriced, frustrating to order, and impossible to get service. 

First of all, the menus are tablets. Like, electronic little fake iPad looking jawns. So cool and technologically advanced, right? No it was the moooost annoying thing ever. You can’t go back and look at things that looked good without going through 100 other pictures, and then trying to go back and find where you left off. WORST OF ALL, you can’t keep going through and pointing to the things you want to order! They had a kind of online shopping style checkout way to order, by adding things to your cart, but unlike the menu descriptions, the things added only in Chinese so if you added something by accident you couldn’t figure out which thing to delete and would just have to start over and OMG MY AGITAAAA. 

Second, no one came back to the dining room to do any of the service in an appropriate fashion. We had to keep flagging someone out in the lobby to order, to pay, &c. During our meal, a white woman was seated at the table next to us. We had seen her at the temples that morning so we made friendly small talk. We finished our meal before anyone even came to give her A MENU. When we saw someone, we asked ‘can someone please get this girl a menu?’ and no one did, so she left without even ordering. UNACCEPTABLE. 

Luckily, the food was pretty great. We had this cool vegetarian spare rib-meat kind of dish that was excellent, and of course a plate of leafy greens. 

They had a salad-y handroll looking thing that I’m always into, full of sprouts and other salad-y things. Unfortunately, the pink sauce tasting weirdly strawberry yogurty, and even if it was vegan, yogurt is gross, so blech. It reminded me of the gross pink dip that comes in supermarket fruit trays. no no no.

We of course got a noodle dish that was really good, the mix-it-yourself kind that has all the good herbs and peanuts and cucumber strips and spiciness but then when you mix it together like you have to in order to eat it all the good stuff sinks to the bottom and even though that’s annoying that’s just science and it’s all still soo good. We lastly got one of my favorite things, the fried vegetarian fish roll sort of jawn that I get all the time at our favorite London Chinatown restaurant. Leong’s Legends. 

So, yeah, all the food was mostly great! So if you are okay with bad service and frustrating order process, then by all means go to Baihe. But, it was also the most expensive restaurant we had been to since, well, the start of this summer’s travels! Sure it wasn’t as much as a meal like this would cost in London, but that’s a pretty high bar considering how expensive London is and how cheap China is. A pot of the most basic tea, for example, was 65 yuan – at most other places it’s, like, 10. That’s crazy! We did not order the tea. 

A few meals were not at all-vegetarian restaurants, if you can believe it! In the APM Mall (SO MANY MALLS IN BEIJING I LOVE IT, AIR CONDITIONING AND BUBBLE TEA!) was an outpost of the very famous Din Tai Fung restaurant, which is in the New York Times Top 10 in the world, apparently. Crazy. There’s one opening soon in London, which I imagine will be priced at 100x as much, because it was pretty cheap and casual and hectic for being so highly ranked. It also was, like, just okay. Granted, they just didn’t have that much for vegans, so I got the standard Chinese restaurant order of a sauteed garlicky leafy green plus another leafy green with bean curd (the smallest amount of bean curd ever served in China) and plain rice. It was fine, perfunctory, but like, not even in the top ten of restaurants we went to in Beijing. I’m sure for Z it was better. The best thing about it, though, was that an official manager lady, complete with microphone headset for running the large restaurant, came over with not-our-waiter, and asked if they would take our photos while we were eating! We were like…seriously? We are used to people asking to take our pictures, or take pics with us, because we are white, but that’s out in the world from regular people. Being asked by the MANAGER of an important restaurant? SO WEIRD! And we were eating! I was literally chewing with food in my mouth and was like um noo thanks you are not taking me with my mouth full of food and then what, putting a poster on the front wall? To quote Danielle Brooks as Sophia in The Color Purple, ‘heeeeeeell no. HELL NO.’ But like, why the manager? And why us? It was full of other whites who were slightly less sweaty, so why us? Did they think I was famous? Who did they think I was? Now I’m curious. But thank goodness I’m not now on Din Tai Fung’s promotional materials before I was able to take my 3rd shower of the day. 

Fortunately, outside the APM mall (and just everywhere on the streets) are tons of fruit carts selling great fresh fruit. I scored this little bucket of melon for 10 yuan. 

Another night, we went into another random mall and found a decent restaurant. I got a thing of greens (always!) and the FUNNIEST salad I’ve ever seen. It was amazing. 

Guys I have no idea what this salad vegetable is! The menu translated as some sort of ice preserved plant, but it wasn’t iceberg lettuce, as I kind of suspected. If you look closely at the stem, you can see little clear beading, like water droplets. But it wasn’t little ice crystals! It was like…fake ice crystals? But it didn’t affect the taste at all, it just somehow made the VEGETABLE kind of icy? It was insane we were hysterical just like what is going on! It was actually really good. It came with a nice sesame dressing but the taste of the vegetable itself was so good and interesting that we preferred it plain. Just like…what is the process they put it through?! It’s so cray. 

Early in our visit, we went to the Zheng Long Zhai Vegetarian Shop to stock up on goodies, as per Jojo’s recommendation. It is a little hard to find and not really near anything convenient, but it’s so worth going to. They have all these amazing jerky packets, like beef jerky and stuff, of 100 different sorts and it’s all vegan! 

I can’t rotate the picture above without crashing the computer (thanks Weebly!), but you can see it’s a LOT of fun stuff. I bought one or two of literally all the jerky options, and most are really good. A little soft for my taste (I’m not supposed to be cooking them…right? They are portable food!…right?) but great, seitan-y goodness. They will so come in handy in the ‘stans, if I don’t eat them all beforehand. I also got two pancake-style single-serving food things, one yuba, and one mushroom. I wish I got more of them because they were delicious. Darn. Then, they have a giant bakery section, for such an incredibly tiny store (so tiny). Everything apparently is vegan! I got a box of crunchy rice cakes that I thought would be like the ones I was addicted to in Thailand – that is, sugary – but they were just plain rice! I was kind of mad but it’s better because they make great daytime snacks while out and about instead of just dessert. I got a few little pastry things that looked great but ended up being buttery flaky things, which you know by now aren’t my favorite, but they were still good. My favorite thing was that pancake looking thing! It was filled with a just barely sweet bean paste and I wish I got a ton of them! So yummy. The cellophane bag of little brown squares I assumed would be peanutty, but despite being fine I really cannot tell what the crap they are. The strangest thing about Chinese dessert, I’ve learned, is that – for a country where people drink bubble tea and juice and all drinks so flipping sweet that just one sip will give you the ‘beetus, their desserts have the smallest amounts of sugar possible to still qualify as dessert. Actually, some things I wouldn’t even let qualify as dessert, they are so non-sweet! It’s crazy! Seriously, I bought a tea from a fridge case once and had to throw it away because it was like pure high-fructose corn syrup. And I get my bubble teas (MY FAVORITE THING NOW, more on those in later posts because I didn’t take pics in Beijing I was too busy eating all the tapioca balls immediately and pouring out the tea just kidding but I would do that) at the ‘zero sugar’ or ‘25% the regular sugar’ options, and they are still hella sweet! It’s so weird that all the drinks are way too sugary but the desserts aren’t sugary enough! Let the two categories share the sugar amounts and both would then be perfect! 

Regardless, this vegetarian shop is a must visit if you are traveling for a while and need snacks and emergency protein strips. 

In the complete opposite world, we also stopped at a Wal-Mart. They have Wal-Marts all over China! And while 90% is Chinese products, they do have a decent amount of recognizable stuff. Like sooo many weird flavored Oreos! We tried the vanilla sundae kind – reeeeally good! – and the strawberry kind – reeeeally gross! We got some candy and some drinks, including a lot of what we thought was cranberry and blueberry juice (as per doctor’s orders!), a really good apple cider vinegar drink, and an almond milk. Some of that is pictured; I think I forgot to take stuff out of another bag. 

The giant carton of coconut water came in handy on our exhausting sweaty trek of the Great Wall (next post!). Those macadamia chocolates are accidentally vegan and we see them EVERYWHERE! Remind me to get more before we leave China. They’re even in Family Marts and 7-11! Those little blue and red tubes in the middle, guess what they are? SINGLE SERVE PEANUT BUTTER PACKS BOIIIII! And the blue is Skippy! Ahhhh! I don’t like Skippy when I’m home but I’m very excited about having it in central Asia! The red kind is the Chinese (and cheaper) option. Yas peanut butter! 

Lastly, I have to share one of my favorite things. After my doctor’s appointment, we went into a nearby office building to pee, and of course the basement where the toilets were had an epic food court/mall style set up because every single building does. The very first thing I ran into? 

A JUICE BAR!!! Despite doctor’s orders to consume berries, I of course ordered the greenest option on the menu (which was also in English!) because I can’t not! If it’s my only real green  juice/smoothie opportunity for 4 months, I’m going to get the greenest one obviously! It was peasprouts, lettuce, pineapple, apple, and orange I think. I think I added spinach? It tasted just like peashoots, and you know what? I loved it. (Z did not.)

Well that’s all the food in Beijing that I have pictures of, so that’s all we’re going to talk about! The food really is incredible. I’m sure with five weeks in China, I’ll get sick of Chinese food at some point, but I don’t see that happening soon. 

Hangzhou is an interesting mashup of a place. From the research we did, it seems like a small village on a big lake, with a neverending forest section that we’d be staying in, surrounded by hills and such lush trees, a calm respite from standard hectic China. But, like…Hangzhou has 9 million residents. I had never heard of it before planning this trip, and it was flipping TWO Philadelphias. And bigger than New York and London! Damn there are so many Chinese people! So even this like ‘small village’ that I hadn’t even heard of before this trip is a gigantic freaking city! Luckily, we were indeed staying in the west side of West Lake, the part that is all forests and much less people. And it’s beautiful. We went into the crazy busy downtown, but West Lake is the real draw of a visit here. 

​At first I was disappointed because our hotel, Best Wishes Inn, our supposed fancy lakeside getaway, was not very nice.  And it wasn’t by the lake, which if you go, you should try to be right by. It was in the correct section of town, but in a little street with dirty shops and restaurants, not set back or remote from this sort of thing at all. And the lake was kind of far from us. But mostly I’m mad because they gave us the crappiest room they had – in the attic, so the roof slanted so short that we hit our heads a lot. The bed was just a mattress on the floor, and the sink was next to the bed. The bathroom was tiny – the shower head over the toilet situation – and there was no room for our luggage except right in the center/only pathway. Suffice it to say they way overcharged us. I tried to say well that’s just how accommodations are here, but then I saw every other room during our 3 nights while they were being cleaned, and they were all spacious and lovely and had actual beds, not just mattresses on the floor. What gives?! Apparently sometimes hotels will give you shitty rooms if they see you used a third party, but like, Booking.com? Really? It’s hard to believe. I can’t help thinking it was just because we were Westerners? Regardless of the reason my blood pressure is rising just thinking about it. But like, again, NO one there spoke English so how could I complain or even just ask wtf was going on? It was hard enough asking for more toilet paper through google translate. 

Fortunately, that was the only letdown for me, because I quite enjoyed Hangzhou itself. It was cool (not temperature, it’s f-ing boiling and buggy) to stroll through the foresty parts to find the Buddhist temples (and, of course, their requisite vegetarian buffets), to hike to West Lake and then around the perimeter, and to explore downtown – while the latter is not strictly necessary (just like any big Chinese city), you will probably want to go there for a meal or two and – do I even need to say it anymore? – for bubble tea. 

We arrived kind of exhausted after we had seen Nanxun that morning, so we rested and watched really weird Chinese teenage vampire soap opera TV. Wow. Then we made our way to the nearest HappyCow listing, the Qing Xin Vegetarian buffet at a near-ish temple complex, about 30 minutes walk away through the forest. It’s getting dark earlier now – no more northern Russia endless sunshine! – so that was a little rough at times with the streets not lit well, but we found the complex it was in – it had a KFC, a Pizza Hut, and two Starbucks! And lots of Chinese restaurants, of course. We queued up the name of the vegetarian buffet in Chinese and showed it to a lady in a convenience store, who helpfully showed us a staircase in the middle of the shopping center and pointed up. Thanks lady! We bought our drinks and stuff from her whenever we were nearby as thanks. 

Unfortunately Qing Xin seemed to be closing down! It was only 6:30pm or so! Darn. A nice lady who worked there tried to communicate that it was shutting soon, but that I could take food from the 8 or so trays that still had some food in them. So, okay! I was hungry and we wouldn’t find anything else probably for an hour so I’ll eat the remnants of the monks’ dinner happily! The few dishes had enough to make a pretty decent plate of food, so it was fine. I scrounged up enough vegetables and tofu to be balanced, and then took a lot of this amazing thick noodle dish that I’m obsessed with now. It was sad to see rows and rows and rows of the food display empty, but we were coming back the next day to see the actual temples nearby, so we planned on coming back right when it opened for lunch! Yay! I finished my portion and went to find the nice lady to pay, and she motioned that I didn’t have to pay because I just took the scraps and it wasn’t the full thing. Sooo nice! I was like really? What country is this? Love her. 

​We totally went back for lunch the next day, and it was PACKED. One of the volunteers spoke a little English and was eager to talk to me – he said they have exactly 100 dishes! That’s a lot of stuff for me to try! I ate a lot, and it was all so good! I loved this place. They were so nice too. I went and found the nice lady this time and she was like ahhh! So happy that we returned! So, the buffet cost 26 yuan, for all you can eat delicious food with the nicest staff. That is like…$4, max. Love it. I would eat there every day if I lived there. Which I don’t want to do, I’m just saying. 

Because it was so busy, everyone shares tables so all the seats are occupied. We were sitting with a mother and her young son, and the son was studying English so he was talking to us a little. So, this was the first English speaker we’d encountered in DAYS! So exciting! What great things would he say to us that we’d be so happy to understand? First, he told me his mother was upset because I was using chopsticks wrong. I hold them too low, apparently. But that gives me more control! Leave me alone! But that wasn’t enough. The kicker was later when he just looked up at me and asked, “How do you eat so much?” JFC, kid.

​After our great meal, we bought tickets for the temple grounds so we could see Lingyin Temple, the most famous one, and all the other temples on the grounds. Neither the book nor the ticket lady for the temple grounds told us this, but you need SEPARATE tickets for Lingyin Temple. See I DO give helpful tips YOU’RE WELCOME. Anyway, they aren’t that expensive and it’s worth it to see all of this because there aren’t that many sights in Hangzhou besides exploring the natural beauty. And by visiting these temples, you are seeing some serious natural beauty simultaneously!

It was so beautiful. And here, in the temples, we saw our first non-Chinese tourists in days. There’s like a weird nod of recognition that everyone gives each other, I don’t know if they’re even aware they’re doing it. Very tribal and strange. 

So Lingyin is Hangzhou’s most famous Buddhist temple, which I guess is why it’s the only one on the grounds with a separate entry ticket. It was built in 326 but what’s there now is not the original – it was destroyed and rebuilt 16 times! There’s lots of grand Buddha et al. statues, including a grand one that’s 20 meters high and built from camphor wood. Lingyin is a pretty pleasant temple and even has a vegetarian noodle restaurant onsite. 

The only very upsetting thing about the temples was that one of the important rooms in Lingyin, full of various Buddha statues, was shaped like a swastika. I think it’s the backwards Chinese buddhism kind, so, the ‘good kind’, but it’s never not offputting to see one. To be in one and stuck like a maze till the end was weird. It was very strange walking around and being like dude what IS this building’s shape we are going like in L’s?? and then going…ohhhhhh I know what this is. So weird. There are swastikas all over the trashcans and signs and stuff too (and we saw some in Beijing temples). Do not like. 

Other than that, it was a nice visit. It requires several hours to see even part of what’s out here. I think I enjoyed the Yongfu temple up at the top of the grounds the most, which has a short climb to a viewing platform of the lake. We were excited for that, but the lake was still far away so it’s like a baby view. 

​The walk around this temple was gorgeous though, and honestly if you are pressed for time I think I would choose this visit over Lingyin. But it’s cool to see as much of this area as you can, if you have time. 

My favorite thing in Hangzhou though was probably walking to and around West Lake. It’s really beautiful. And yes it’s super crowded with Chinese tourists who don’t know how to walk in public, but it’s worth it. 
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The first time we saw the lake, we were en route downtown and chanced upon this photoshoot! 

For our full day of West Lake sightseeing, we walked from our hotel through about an hour and a half of unoccupied forest, with really nothing along the way but nature and old bridges and things. It was such a nice surprise to find such empty bits!

​As we got closer to the busier parts of the lake (like where resorts are), things started to pick up in terms of people and shops and sights. 

​I had to pee really badly at one point and we saw a sign pointing into a resort or something, so we wandered through the resort grounds, which were so lovely, and found it. But then we noticed that if we kept going farther inward, away from the street we were walking on, we would reach a really busy shopping center area right on the part of the lake we wanted, where all the boats are! So thank goodness I had to pee because we found the spot we wanted! 

​And thank goodness also because this shopping center was amaaazing. If you follow me on instagram (which you should, links at the top of the page), you saw the incredible mango drink I had here. I saw people getting these gigantic towers of smoothie with dry ice pouring out of it! It was so fun! I got one of course after watching them make one and confirming it was just mango blended with ice in the smoothie part. Then the dry ice container was fitted in, and then a cup of mango shaved ice was put on top, all topped with chunks of fresh mango. It was SO GOOD and so fun! 

I should have taken video, I know now! Just imagine dry ice shooting out every which way like a fog machine! 

But that wasn’t even my favorite find of this center, because next door was a little shop selling a Chinese sort of pirozhok, the Russian stuffed bread rolls. I confirmed with the few important words I learned which were vegetarian, and got a cabbage filled one. I really should have gotten 100 of them and somehow froze them and shipped them to London for studying, or just eaten 100 immediately, because they were one of the best things ever. I was obsessed. They were just perfect. Dammit I want one now. I have to learn how to make pirozhki when home. I will blog about it if I do. 

​We kept walking through the beautiful waterfront for awhile until we reached the causeway that would let us cross part of the lake. It was so fun! 

​I really enjoyed this walk and this whole part of Hangzhou and West Lake. So beautiful and tranquil despite all the people. 

​What’s not tranquil is Hangzhou town. It’s not bad, it’s just not worth it. It’s another big super crowded and busy city where motorbikes will drive right at you even if they have a red light and there are thousands of abandoned rideshare bicycles blocking the sidewalks and there are too many cars and people and it’s hot and smelly so like, what’s the point when you can stay by the lake? 

Oh right, bubble tea. I was on a mission. Such a mission, that I ended up having 3 teas in one evening! The first one was a let down because the fruit teas often don’t come with bubbles and they didn’t understand my request for them. UGHHH. It was a tea stand that wasn’t a recognizable chain – always stick with the ones with a little table on the menu with bubble options you can point to! 

The second was decent, but it wasn’t a Gong Cha or Coco (the famous chains) but a 1Tea, which I really like now, but I didn’t know then (my first from them) that when you say zero sugar to them (who am I kidding – I mean when you point to the zero sugar option on the menu), it actually IS zero sugar (at the others, it’s still sweet!). And I got a lemon tea drink, so it was suuuper sour and hard to enjoy the bubbles. 

But then we found a third! And it was a Gong Cha! It was too sweet of course and I was suuuper sick from having so much tea in such a short period but I couldn’t turn it down! 

The food in Hangzhou aside from my favorite aforementioned buffet was good, as it is in all the cities in China! Flipping Chinese food is amazeballs and so vegan-friendly. I especially liked a place called Super Vegan, for obvious reasons! It was very nice inside, the common type of vegetarian restaurant here where I feel underdressed – the opposite of so many vegan places in the west that are so casual and hippie like. I am so impressed with the array of vegan restaurants in China’s big cities. At Super Vegan (which, by the way, just says Vegan on the awning, not super), I had to try several dishes that I found recommended in the HappyCow reviews, like this plate of sweet and sour spare ribs. So far in China, every time I get spare ribs it’s small pieces like this, not like how they do it in the USA. Might be just the vegan versions, but might be for real too. 

These were freaking fantastic! In fact, all the food at Super Vegan was, and I wish I could eat here again. The texture was perfect, reminiscent enough of meat’s pull-apartness and chewiness without being disgustingly close or too hard or soft. I usually don’t like sweet and sour stuff but this could change my stance on the whole issue. 

I also got a big ass plate of broccoli with some mushrooms in vegetarian oyster sauce, mostly because I need a big plate of greens as often as possible, but also because veggie oyster sauce! So fun! It was great, as most broccoli is. Then I got the Taiwan-style sauteed rice noodles, with veggie meat, cabbage, carrot, and mushrooms. It didn’t have as much of the non-noodle parts as the menu picture suggested, but still, really good! 

Almost embarrassed to share the next picture, but come on, you know me – if there’s one on the menu when I’m traveling, I’m GONNA get it: 

It had avocado and quinoa in it! Super Vegaaaaannnnn! 

Lastly, we got the most inventive, delicious, and all around amazing dish on the menu. Okay that’s a bold statement because as always in Chinese vegetarian restaurants the menu was 1000 pages long, and we got five things only, but this was off the charts. It was just called Golden Suncake, and the ingredients on the menu said “green bean, pumpkin, and soy protein”. I had no idea what we’d get, despite the picture, which was very vague and sort of dumpling looking. What came out, was a vegan replica of a fried egg, with a mashed pumpkin center. Not just any fried egg. The most delicious one ever. It was PERFECTION. Eggy and the perfect texture but without being too weirdly gross eggy, and with that pumpkin yolk part? Ridiculously good. Also TELL ME how this is made of green beans?! 

We enjoyed the food so much that we got an order of the tea tree mushrooms, “Yu mountain style”, to go. They were fried strips of mushrooms that looked in the picture like French fries, and, even better, looked in real life and tasted like fried clam strips! Amazing! Oh man, if you are ever in Hangzhou, go to Super Vegan, get all the food, get more to go, tell them I said hi, just kidding, Marky, pick up your phone. 

We enjoyed our time in Hangzhou! We were there for a while, but we didn’t do as much as we’ve been doing in other cities. It was nice to not rush around, to get to relax and go do things when we wanted and not when we must in order to fit them into a tight schedule. We have plenty of that coming, but it was important to realize that more easygoing stretches are okay, and necessary. And look how beautiful it was – outside the city. Haha I just realized I didn’t even take pictures of downtown! Eh you can imagine it – traffic, more traffic, lots of people. Stick to West Lake! It’s really as beautiful as they say.