DUNHUANG, CHINA: EATING OUT, THE NIGHT MARKET, AND THE SUN GRAND HOTEL

Early on in this trip we determined to escape the massive tour group dinners as often as we could. Besides, Bob had heard of some regional delicacies in Dunhuang that he was pretty sure weren't going to show up on our plates at those generic meals, and he was determined to find a place where they would.

On our first night in Dunhuang, Bob asked Orlando (the name our Chinese guide chose for herself) if there was a place nearby that served donkey and camel meat, the specialties he was most interested in. She said there was and offered to take us there. It happened to be about two blocks from our hotel, a very short walk. We coerced coaxed Terry and Geneil to go with us and set off.

When we arrived, it appeared that we were the only guests in the restaurant, which was a bit of a concern since it was Saturday night. Orlando called the establishment "The Happiness and Lucky Restaurant," which may account for the almost all-red decor; red is the color that symbolizes both happiness and good luck for the Chinese.

We sat around a large round table, and before she left us, Orlando ordered from the all-Chinese menu, which was very helpful since we can read ZERO Chinese and the staff spoke ZERO English. We should have had Orlando arrange the price as well, but more on that later.

Bob had her order two donkey meat dishes and camel "three ways" (paw, hump, and generic meat). Terry and Geneil wisely ordered a chicken dish, but which turned out to be something other than chicken--perhaps goose? Our table was quite full:

Here is the Camel Three Ways: strips of fried hump (not bad), hoof (flavorless cartilage--gross), and "regular" meat (pretty good):

 It was served on a single awe-inspiring platter:

I have to admit that this donkey dish was pretty good. The meat was tender and tasty, and the vegetables added some nice flavor:

We also had donkey meat with yellow noodles. Yellow noodles are another regional specialty, and. I really liked them. The donkey, what there was of it, wasn't bad:

We did have one slight problem when it came time to pay. The card reader machine would not recognize any of our credit cards, so we ended up paying in US dollars. They brought us a bill and we figured it was about $173 in US currency, an outrageous amount (our hotel is currently listed on TripAdvisor at $26/night), but we didn't have much choice but to pay. We actually offered $180, but the waiter somehow managed to convey that nothing less than $190 would be acceptable, so we coughed it up and left, having learned a lesson about scamming.

We had another meal out on the town the next evening at the Dunhuang Night Market, happily missing another "cultural show" and dinner with the tour group.

Again, we had Orlando walk us there (around the corner from our hotel in the other direction) and select the outdoor restaurant she thought was the best. She told us that the best restaurants were all run by Muslims, and she took us to the one at the very end of the street the market was on. It had a large round outdoor oven for cooking the meat.

There were six of us this time, and that led to a wide variety of food, including this spit-roasted "chicken" with its head still on:

Cucumber salad (later in the trip when everyone started to get GI problems, we stopped eating cold salads):

Tomatoes and egg:

The delicious Dunhuang noodles:

Chinese green beans with hot red peppers, a favorite dish on our trip to Beijing ten years ago and just as good here:

I ordered mutton skewers and was a little disappointed by the size of my serving, especially since they were really, really good. But then again, I think they cost about 75 cents each:

Bob ordered mutton ribs cooked on a multi-armed spit, the last dish to make it to the table. It should have come earlier because the meat was overdone, but it sure was interesting to look at!

Our meal for six people, while not as lavish or elegant as our meal the previous night, cost a mere fraction of the previous meal's price--something like $4/person rather than $50/person.

It was a fun meal, made even more fun by the people walking by who would stop to gawk and take pictures of us. Apparently Westerners are not very common in Dunhuang, as we would learn is also the case in other Northwestern Chinese cities and all five of the Stans. 

After dinner we had time to walk around the market, which seemed designed for foreign (i.e., European and American) tourists but was full of Chinese people.

My favorite booth was this one where a man drizzled caramelized sugar onto a sheet of waxed paper to make various designs:

He placed a long stick on the design while it was still liquid.  The caramelized sugar dried and hardened to make the most amazing "lollipops" I've ever seen:

Of course, there were other things we don't usually see in our local farmers market, including these oyster mushrooms (left) and little crabs (right)

Here are the staples we saw at just about every market on our trip: dried fruit (lots of raisins):

. . . grapes:

. . . nuts and spices:

But we only saw these skewered delights in Dunhuang, lined up in a refrigerated case. It seemed to be only children eating them, so we guessed it was a sweet of some kind. Orlando told us they are tomatoes stuffed with nuts and drenched in a honey syrup. Does that sound good to you? Me neither.

We headed back towards our hotel, past a roundabout graced by this interesting statue of a woman playing a guitar-like instrument behind her head:

Then we made a fateful decision when we stopped at what looked like an ice cream shop. Looks good, right?

We went inside and ordered by pointing to a picture of a rather elaborate waffle cone. Even the prices were in Chinese, which should have been a red flag. The lady behind the counter spoke zero English and looked about as much like an ice cream shop employee as Abraham Lincoln. She was dressed and coiffed very fashionably, right down to her high-heeled shoes:

She started making our cones--from scratch. She pulled out the flour, sugar, eggs, etc., mixed them, and poured the batter into this waffle iron. Then we waited. And waited. Then she apparently realized she had done something wrong, because she started all over, but she didn't take the wrong one out of the iron, and of course it burned on. No explanation. (None was possible given the language barrier.)

Of course then she had to scrub it, which took a lot more time, and then she had to cook the waffle cone, and . . . seriously?? How do they make any money? No one else came n the whole time we were there, and we were there FORTY MINUTES. No discount was offered and we paid  $4 each for our two cones. Remember that our hotel room cost $26.

The worst part is that they weren't very good. The cones were a little soggy, and the ice cream had an artificial flavor we didn't like. We ended up throwing them away.

A few final words about that $26 hotel, the Sun Grand Hotel, rated #11 out of 153 on TripAdvisor (at least this week). When we drove up, we were greeted by another nice sign on the marquee:

A view of Dunhuang from the hotel. Not quite as pretty as our view in Xi'an:

Our room was spacious and elegantly decorated, but when we sat on the bed, we discovered it was as hard as concrete. I actually lifted up the blankets to see if there was any kind of padding at all on the slab. Nope. Apparently this is the Chinese style of mattress.

In the morning we had no hot water in the shower. It was not our best hotel.

However, it did have an awesome Chinglish sign in the bathroom:

What's not to love about this random face? I think it was a knob, but I can't remember:

And a final redeeming factor was found in the dining room: the Noodle Man:

Awesome, right?