My journey often starts from the subway in Beijing. when I want to travel to some places of interest, I check the route of the journey first and decide which station to stop and take a look. What about you? When you start your China Tours and Travel to Beijing, which station of the subway would you like to choose? Perhaps, some of them attract you in different ways. However, I want to talk about the story of Xinjiekou today.
Xinjiekou is the name of one station in line 4. I choose to stop at Xinjiekou for the reason that one of my friends wants to celebrate her birthday in one special restaurant. So let us begin with it:
1. 
Yunnan restaurant
The name of my friend is Jinli. In Chinese, Jin means shining and Li stands for beauty. In fact, she is an out-going girl from Yunnan province. In order to celebrate this special day of her own, the 21th birthday, she searches the internet and finds this restaurant with rich Yunnan flavor.
It is located about 50 meters beside the Xinjiekou subway station. The shop sign is made of wood with 4 Chinese characters: Yunnan restaurant. And the signature dishes of this restaurant is Yunnan rice noodles, we call it Guoqiaomixian. From the name of this dish, we know that it is made of rice even though it looks like noodle. And Guoqiao means crossing the bridge and there is an anecdote about it. It is said once upon a time, there is a virtuous wife whose husband worked busily in the field, and he did not have enough time to have his lunch everyday. In order to let her husband take the lunch when it is hot, she invented a special way to keep the lunch hot. She put the rice noodle in a big casserole with some other ingredients, like chicken meat, vegetable, quail eggs, sliced ham etc. The noodles are poured into hot soup with a film of oil. Because of the oil, the rice noodle could still be hot when she went cross the bridge and finally sent it to her husband. Since it is made with great care, there is no doubt that it is palatable.
Besides the Yunnan rice noodle, the Yunnan restaurant is also famous for its various kinds of wild vegetables. Because Yunnan’s special climate (there is only spring in this beautiful place), it is abound in wild vegetables and the clever people in Yunnan make full use of them. If you are a vegetarian, congratulations! There are so many kinds of vegetables to choose from.
2. Beijing Cloth Shoes
After the nice meal we took in Yunnan restaurant, we began to wonder around in the streets.
In the shops by the road, we found something interesting, the Beijing cloth shoes. In one of the famous poems in China, the poem describes the mood of a mother when her son was going to leave home. In order to let her son feel more comfortable while he was away, she put pieces of cloth together, shaped it like the sole of a shoe and sewed it with needle and string. Therefore, cloth shoes are the symbol of comfort. Nowadays, cloth shoes do not only stand for comfort, but fashion as well. More fashion items are added into the cloth shoes. So they become widely popular again.
3. 
Music Shops
I was attracted by the sound of classic music which came out of a tiny shop. Even though the music shop is not a big one, it sells many kinds of musical instruments, from violin to Erhu. Erhu is a two-stringed bowed instrument and it is widely used in traditional Chinese festivals. It is hard to handle because there are two strings in all. And there are also some other traditional Chinese instruments that I do not know.
If you have decided to start your Beijing Tours, choose the station that you want to stop first. And do not forget Xinjiekou that I strongly recommended. .
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