Brillig Beijing: Buffet Style

Even without those odd little multilingual/cultural moments (eg asking a concierge to call a taxi then waiting in consternation for twenty minutes as he vanished out the front door) hotel life would be a fascinating and exotic experience for me. The best part, inevitably, is the breakfast buffet (fairly necessary when one carts an infant to a foreign country). It’s exorbitantly priced, as one would expect, and has about a hundred different dishes. We park Louisette at a table (prepped for the inevitable midmeal nappy change) and take it in turns to get food.

If I was still young, and still had faith in my digestive system, I would perhaps challenge myself to try every single dish at least once. Here’s one good reason why not – that’s salted duck eggs on the left (fine), and fermented bean curd on the right (for breakfast).

One of the juices featured is tomato, and there is a suspicious stand near the juices that appears to contain most of the other fixings for a bloody mary (but who am I to judge?)

At the time of writing, I felt I’d had enough experimentation and should just give up. Apart from anything else, the pancake griddle is increasingly temperamental and my interactions with the staff there are getting more and more awkward. Also, there were no dim sum pork buns OR red bean paste buns today, which was very disappointing. So all I ate was some fresh bread and butter, a hash brown, scrambled eggs, a fried chicken-and-indeterminate-vegetable dumpling, orange juice, grape juice, and five pancakes with butter and maple syrup (and I sneakily added cheese to one of them, since they were cooked on the omelette stand after a mild altercation between the pancake and egg staff), some fresh berries (one of which I didn’t recognise). And all I stole was a bit more butter, and a knife slipped into Louisette’s bag.

What a poor effort. I’m sure I’ll do better tomorrow.