Note: This post is written by Suanne. Ben’s comments are in quotes.

After visiting the Beijing Railway Museum, we returned to Qian Men Dajie to do more exploration.

There are so many side streets and most of them are new. From the looks of it, they are still expanding the entire place. I bet once they are done, this place will be at least twice its size.

We sneaked into one of the new lesser known side street and was surprised with what we found there.

We came across a dumpling restaurnat where passer by can view the chef at work. They were making some fancy dumpling wrappers. First, they roll small pieces of dough into a flat disc. They stacked a few of the rolled out dough together and rolled the edges in such a way into a wavy form. We were enticed to go into the restaurant to try the dumplings there.

Yeah, we were not particularly hungry but we were so taken in by the chef at work we decided to go in.

We ordered three items to try. The first item is of course the siew mai made with the fancy wrapper. We opted for pork siew mai.

We did not even know what we wanted. We just went in and ordered what everyone else is eating.

The siew mai did look fancy with the top that looks like a flower. However, we found that …the top is a bit dry and we had to dip it into a dipping sauce that came with the siew mai.

I think we need to eat it really quickly. Like you said, the ends of the wrapper do look dry. Actually, this one just looked fancy. There are a lot of dough. I wish there were more meat to tell the truth.

The second dish is another fancy dish that we have never seen before. We were very curious how this is made.

Now, this one is awesome! Not only it looked great, it actually tasted really good. Even if it is eaten by itself.

It looked like honeycomb. It’s kind of doughy and it is meant to be eaten with the dipping sauces that came with it.

We can’t quite figure out how it is made. On one hand, it looked like rolled up dough arranged nicely but then it did not seem so. I was poking my nose around the kitchen to see how they made this. The only thing I saw was stacks of the steamers of these with this premade sitting in the fridge. I am guessing they might have made this offsite.

Ben enjoyed this a lot. The dipping sauces played a very important role in this dish.

Yup, enjoyed this a lot. If only this is closer, I would eat this every week. I still don’t know what this is called. I vaguely recall that this is a speciality in one of the provinces.

We also ordered a snack dish that came with a meatball, a beancurd like stuff and a tofu item (I think). They were pretty good. All the above came to RMB85 (about CAD7.20).

We could not get a cab from where we were at that peak hour. So, we decided to walk back to the apartment although we were pretty tired. On the way back, we had a glimpse of Tiananen Square’s night scene. It’s beautiful at night with the glow of lights. This concluded my second day in Beijing.

What a day! I think we must have walked like 10-12 km in total that day. My feet were killing me but we had such great fun.