First, our host family brought Justin and me to a restaurant for dinner. It was pretty similar to the meals that we've been eating throughout the trip, with a bunch of communal dishes in the middle of the table that everyone ate from. However, this was our first taste of the truly alien aspects of Chinese cooking. The first dish that came out was several small bowls of soup, each with a mysterious thing in them. I decided even before I got on the flight to Beijing that I would eat everything served to me, and not ask what it was until I had taken at least a bite of it. It was chewy, with an oddly plasticine texture, but not altogether unpleasant. I asked our host brother what it was, but he didn't know how to say its name in English. After a few seconds on his phone, he showed us the results of his translation: sea cucumber. The sea cucumber was closely followed by kidney (great flavor, somewhat odd texture) and jellyfish (oddly hard; as soon as I bit it and felt the resistance, it was all I could do to swallow it whole without throwing up). Nearing the end of the meal, the waitress brought out a whole fish. I was a bit bewildered as to how to eat it at first, but once the father demonstrated how to just rip off chunks of the body with chopsticks is was easy to eat and turned out to be delicious. -- Ian Bryant-Smith