I feel lik I'm in the not too distant future!

A trip down to Wangfujing Road feels just like fast forwarding 20 years into the future. I stepped out of the subway and was taken aback by the sheer scale of the street life. The throngs of people milling around the street heading into the sleek buildings made me feel like I could be in a much cooler and hipper Universal City Walk.


Now I normally would cringe at the comparison or yearning for Universal City Walk amenities, but this feels so much better. Unlike City walk which is a very manufactured experience, this has some history and connection with its surroundings. The area also reminded me of Koreatown, with its flavor of modernity, sleek buildings and fashionable people milling about, but taken to a whole new level with the scale of the buildings and by having a pedestrian only street.

Grant it the sky matched the color of the buildings (gray), but it still left me totally mesmerized and questioning why on earth we don't have more pedestrian only streets in LA. I thought how cool it would be to have this replicated (in a much smaller scale) on Broadway, and was ready to start a campaign to shut down Broadway when I get home. Fortunately someone else seems to have had the same idea so I can focus on other things.

The whole reason for trekking to this part of town was to eat Beijing’s famous hot pot cuisine. The way hot pot works, is you have a large..well.hot pot..that is has a heating source in the center and is filled with boiling water. Then everyone around the table gets raw meets and vegetables to put in the hot pot until they are cooked, then you dip your meet or veggie into this special sauce and enjoy. This really makes dining as entertainment and very delicious. I can't wait to get back to LA and see if I can find a hot pot restaurant in, its like a Korean BBQ, only with boiled water.


Other interesting tidbit of history on my tour of Wangfujing Road, include this Catholic Church,


and this famous alley where you can get virtually anything on a stick. We stuck to the glazed fruit on a stick, though the more adventurous out there could enjoy everything from squid, crab, scorpion, beetle and locust on a stick.


I think I'll stick to animals with between 2 and 4 legs for my culinary experiences.