SATURDAY, 10/18/14

As with most Saturdays, we started slowly. One of the expat monthly magazines is sponsoring a “Best Beijing Pizza” contest. They’ve selected 64 pizza joints from throughout Beijing and placed them in brackets, and just like March Madness, there will be elimination rounds until a winner is selected. They’re having a “contest kickoff” today, and I convinced Judy to go with me.

The “Galaxy SOHO” is a crazy looking building.

It’s a gorgeous day and we taxi over to the Galaxy Soho area where the pizza fest is taking place. We’ve never visited this part of town before, but we’ve driven by the crazy looking building several times. There are about 16 different pizza vendors with booths, selling pizza by the slice and promoting their product for the contest. There are a couple of pretty good pizzas we tried, but there was no way we could get around to all of them. We did manage to eat enough to be miserable when we get home.

SUNDAY, 10/19/14

As if we didn’t get enough food yesterday at the pizza fest, we’re meeting some of the BISS group at NOLA for brunch. The menu contains lots of Southern style foods with New Orleans leanings. The beignets and skillet dishes are really good. This restaurant is a new one for us, and in a section of town we haven’t visited before. It’s in the middle of lots of embassies.

Back home later, we try to nail down our travel plans for the newly announced APEC holiday. It’s 3 weeks away, and since only Beijing is taking the holiday, it’s a great time to travel to sites in China. We’ve decided to go to Shanghai. The HSBC World Golf Championship is in Shanghai that weekend. There is lots of history related to Shanghai, so there will be many places to visit. We just need to decide where we’re going to stay, and how we’re going to travel.