Happy Thanksgiving...China style!

Not having good internet in China has put us behind on our blogging, but we thought we should skip ahead a bit and talk about Thanksgiving!  Back to the Great Wall, Xi'an, and Shanghai later.

Our last meal in China happened to be Thanksgiving Day so we decided to go all out.  We weren't going to let being half-way around the world stop us from celebrating one of our favorite American holidays...it was time for a feast!  They don't have turkey in Shanghai, so we went with the next best thing, Peking Duck.  Peking Duck is from Beijing (Peking is the traditional name for the city), so we did some research and found an authentic restaurant that serves it in Shanghai.  I think we made a good choice because the place was packed with Chinese and there was a big cart of ducks being carved up at a station near the door.

carving up the duck

Since it was Thanksgiving, we wanted to have a full table of food, so ordered several dishes to share.  This is a typical Chinese way to order at restaurants, so it worked out pretty good.  We went for anything that sounded remotely "Thanksgiving-ish."  We had...

a feast

Peking Duck - They brought us a platter of thinly sliced pieces of meat, sauce, some crispy and thin slices of greens, and Chinese "pancakes".  We had no idea what to do with all of this, so we tried to sneak a peak at what other people were doing.  We never had a good view so we are not sure we did it the right way, but what we came up with was dipping a couple pieces of meat in the sauce and putting it on the pancake with a little bit of the sliced greens and then wrapping it up and eating it.  Seemed right.  Adam wasn't too fond of it, but I actually didn't think it was too bad.  I liked that the meat was wrapped up and I didn't have to look at it when I ate so I didn't have to think about the fact that I was eating duck.

Chinese Yams with Pomelo Sauce - We knew when we ordered this that pomelo is a type of citrus fruit, so the combination didn't sound good...but yams fit in with Thanksgiving so we were hoping to be surprised.  Unfortunately, we were right and it wasn't good.  It tasted like cold mashed potatoes topped with sour fruit sauce. I ate a little bit but Adam was done after his first bite.

Broccoli - Doesn't scream Thanksgiving, but it's hard to go wrong with steamed broccoli.

Apples cooked in toffee - This one wasn't too bad.  It was a mound of apple chunks covered in rock hard caramelized sugar.  The only problem was we weren't sure how to eat it since all we had was chopsticks and they weren't putting a dent in the toffee.  The waitress set a little bowl of water by the plate and pointed to the apples, but we weren't sure what it was for.  She saw us struggling with it a little later on and brought over a knife which made it a lot easier.

Homemade Pumpkin Pie - We couldn't believe it when we saw this on the menu.  How perfect!  We had a feeling that it wasn't going to be normal pumpkin pie since it was the cheapest thing on the menu at only 1 RMB, about 15 cents, but it was worth a shot.  When this dish came out it was a big surprise.  Hard to explain, but it was a kind of sticky steamed dough with a Chinese design stamped into it and filled with red bean paste.  Didn't taste the least bit like pumpkin although it did have a slight orange color.

It turned out to be a very memorable Thanksgiving dinner.  Probably not our favorite turkey-day meal, but still a memorable one!  We have so many things to be thankful for this year...being able to see so many amazing things and places, meeting new people, and having the support and love of our family and friends back home. Plus there's each other, but after almost 4 and a half months of being together 24/7 we're more thankful that the trip is almost over! No, just kidding, it's been an amazing journey so far with it's up's and down's, but we're both thankful to have somebody to share it with. All that said, we do hope it's the last Thanksgiving we ever spend in China!