Ingredients for Crossing the Bridge Noodles 过桥米线
From the hostel we took a cab to bring us to the Suzhou Train Station. According to the staff of the Suzhou Mingtown International Youth Hostel, we can walk to the train station for about thirty minutes from the hostel. However, we do not plan on doing that and since there were three of us, it was more cost effective to do this. We managed to pick up tickets back to Shanghai, although there weren’t any available that will leave immediately. So we decided to find some places to sit within the train station. This proved to be far more difficult than we anticipated. The train station wasn’t as massive as the one in Shanghai and there were a lot of people there waiting to get on their respective trains.
Crossing the Bridge Noodle 过桥米线 Broth
We did manage to find places to sit inside a KFC where we naturally had to purchase food. Interestingly, it would seem that the KFC here doesn’t have any of the familiar two piece chicken that is standard fare in all the other countries I have visited. Apparently, here a two piece chicken means two parts of a wing. I don’t quite understand it. Also, for China, the KFC here is quite expensive and would probably be out of reach by the ordinary folk.
After three hours of waiting we finally got on our train back to Shanghai. We didn’t get a row of three seats and we had to sit separately. I quickly fell fast asleep and I was woken up by my friend just as we were pulling over to Shanghai. The trip took around 20 minutes, talk about fast. It was already past nine and we head out to Nanjing Road East to find something to eat. My friends decided to eat at a restaurant they spotted while walking. It was on the second floor of a shopping center and they seem to specialize in noodles.
Mouth Watering Chicken 口水鸡 Side Dish
The noodles here were the Crossing the Bridge Noodles 过桥米线, which is a specialty from Yunnan province. The story is that a devoted wife would bring this soup across the bridge to her studying husband. Because of the layer of oil on the surface of the soup, the noodles will still be hot by the time she reaches her husband. The soup is typically chicken soup and there are various stuff you can dump inside the soup. Normally, the ingredients are separated into small plates and then dumped into the soup when they give it to you. It is normally a hearty meal, but I made the mistake of dumping all of the Sichuan pepper into the soup and turned my meal into an agonizing hot and numbing meal. I love Sichuan pepper but a whole plateful of it is never good.
In the end, I managed to finish my bowl and I have no one to blame but myself. My friend didn’t like hers to begin with, she wasn’t very comfortable with the place as she thinks it wasn’t very clean, I don’t think she even finished her noodles. I was actually okay for me, at least the place was. The soup was nice until I dumped all the Sichuan pepper, that is. It was a very tiring day and we quickly head back to the hostel to get some rest.
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