Beijing Imperial Court Food

    Imperial Court Food（宫廷菜）is a style of food with origins in the Imperial Palace and it is well-known for the original features of the raw materials and carefully selected ingredients. In addition, the dishes are decorated with different colored vegetables and fruits in various shapes. Each dish has a special name, such as Yu Feng Huan Chao. And some of them even have short stories. Today, Imperial Court Food has become an important school of Chinese cooking with several places offering this special taste. While expensive, it is worth trying.

    Restaurants of Imperial Court Food

    Fangshan Restaurant

    Fangshan Restaurant is the most famous one offering the first-class Imperial Court Food. The restaurant is made up of three parts and it can hold 500 people eating at the time. It is decorated in imperial style with the design of dragon and phoenix. Here is the best place to experience the life of the Chinese emperors in former days. Now, it serves nearly 800 kinds of Imperial Court Dishes. Among them, Man-Han Banquet is the most famous.

    Li Jia Cai Restaurant

    The dinner here is served by set menu starting at ¥298/ person. That is to say, a quest cannot order a dish but a set of dishes. There are no chemicals in the dishes and all tastes are natural. This restaurant has welcomed many famous people including Bill Gates, the former premier of Britain, John Major, and Chinese superstar Jackie Chan.

    Yushan Restaurant

    The layout of the restaurant follows the imperial palace. When eating in the restaurant, diners are served by waitresses in traditional imperial clothes.

    Da Zhai Men

    The dishes and snacks cooked in this restaurant are worthy to have a try. And, the traditional performances at night is one of the restaurant's attractions.

    Royal Palace

    Both of the food and services of this restaurant are so good. You can also enjoy some wonderful performances in this large courtyard.

    National Coal Mining Museum

    Wacky Wednesdays—the perfect way to entertain the kids under 5!

    Each week during term-time from 10:15-l1:00 we combine storytelling, singing and craft（工艺）activities—the perfect opportunity to drop in and have a good time with your under-5s.

    Designed for children from 9 months.

    Doors open early at 9:30, so come and enjoy a coffee, juice and cake before the event starts!

    Sign in from 10 for a 10:15 start.

    Only 20 children are expected to take part in the event (we prepare crafts for 20). This makes it enjoyable for all. On very few occasions when too many kids want to join in there are always plenty of other things to do at the Museum.

    Why not make a day of it?

    ▲Stay for lunch in our family-friendly cafe

    ▲Explore the Nature Trail

    ▲Discover our indoor soft play area for under-5s

    ▲Play in the wonderful NEW Adventure Playground

    ▲Visit the small horses and our Clydesdale Finn

    ▲Download the iSPY Explore App and explore the Museum together

    Each event starts at 10:15 and finishes at 11:00.

    2017

    Sept 13th-Oct 18th                        Nov 1st-Dec 6th

    Wacky Wednesday Christmas Special 13th Dec (Payment & Booking Required)

    2018

    Jan 10th-Feb 14th                        Feb 28th-Mar 28th

    Apr 18th-May 23rd                        Jun 6th-July 18th

    Free entry, but we welcome donations to cover the cost of materials.

    We were on tour a few summers ago, driving through Chicago， when right outside of the city, we got pulled over(被迫停车). A middle-aged policeman came up to the car and was really being troublesome at first. He said,“ You were speeding. Where are you going in such a hurry?” Our guitarist, Tim, told him that we were on our way to Wisconsin to play a show. Then his way towards us totally changed. He asked, “Oh, so you boys are in a band(乐队)?” We told him that we were. He then asked all the usual band questions about the type of music we played and how long we had been at it.

    Suddenly, he stopped and said, “Tim, you want to get out of this ticket, don't you?” Tim said, “Yes.” So the officer asked him to step out of the car. The rest of us, inside the car, didn't know what to think as we watched the policeman talk to Tim. Then the policeman put Tim in the back of the police car and threw the car into reverse(倒车), stopping a few feet in back of our car.

    Now we suddenly felt frightened. We didn't know if we were all going to prison. Suddenly, the policeman's voice came over in a loudspeaker. He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time ever, we have Tim here singing on Route 90.” Later we knew, the policeman had told Tim that if he sang one of our songs over the loudspeaker in the police car, we would get out of the ticket. Seconds later, Tim started screaming into the receiver. The policeman enjoyed the performance, and sent us on our way without a ticket.

    If American waterways had ever been voted on the yearbook, the Buffalo River could easily have been named Ugliest. It could be hard to find hope there. It took decades for public perception of the river to shift. But activist citizens, who collaborated with industry, government, and environment groups never gave up on their polluted river—the Buffalo River gradually went from being considered a lost cause to a place worth fighting for. And by now the cleaned—up water is one of Buffalo's biggest attractions.

    By the 1960s, the river was seen as one of the worst sources of pollution pouring into the Great Lakes. The Buffalo River had caught fire many times. The surface had an oily layer, and any fish caught there were not eatable.

    The waterway's fate started shifting in the mid-1960s. Stanley Spisiak was a local Polish—American jeweler by day, but by evening he was the kind of guy who'd chase down dumpers(垃圾车)he spotted on the Buffalo River. By 1966 he found himself winning the National Wildlife Federation's “Water Conservationist of the Year” award. And before long he got a nickname:“Mr. Buffalo River.” But there was only so much he could do—the river was still declared biologically dead in 1969.

    Jill Spisiak Jedlicka is his great-grandniece. She picks up where he left off by directing the river's protector organization, Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper. Professor Schneekloth and seven friends founded the organization as an all-volunteer nonprofit in 1989, after organizing the first river cleanup that year. Today the group employs 27 full-time workers and has helped oversee the Buffalo River's $100 million restoration.

    So far, the Buffalo River's water quality has restored, but it is still an ongoing issue, as sewage(污水)can overflow into the river after storms. Habitat restoration continues as well; fish and plantings are still being sampled to measure how well it's gone.

    Fashions have a lot of rules. Most of them, however, are just wrong. But there's one rule that goes beyond tradition and into the field of scientific study of the brain: Black garments are slimming. It all comes down to how your visual system processes the light. The below holes in each square are the same in size, yet the white hole looks bigger than the black hole.

    In the 1500s, Galileo Galilei noticed that some of the planets looked larger when viewed with the naked eye (肉眼) than they did when viewed through a telescope, making the white light of Venus (金星) appear eight to ten times larger than Jupiter (木星) in the night sky. He knew something strange must be going on with his vision to cause this illusion, but he wasn't sure what it was. Luckily, scientists never stopped wondering, and in 2014, they figured it out.

    Our visual system operates via two main channels: "on" neurons (神经元) that are sensitive to light things and "off" neurons that are sensitive to dark things. When it came to the dark "off" neurons, the researchers found that they responded predictably to dark shapes on a light background — the greater the contrast between the two, the more active these neurons were. But the light "on" neurons behaved unpredictably. Even with the same amount of contrast, light objects on a dark background caused a greater response in these neurons.

    This makes some sense, evolutionarily speaking. In the dark of night, you'd want to be able to take in every bit of light you can get, so a visual system that enlarges light objects on a dark background could be very useful. However, it's not that hard to see dark objects in the light of day. It has some effects in the colors of your clothes and in the appearance of the planets—the brighter appearance of Venus in the night sky makes it look bigger than the darker Jupiter.

    Most people agree that eating healthy food is important. But sometimes making good food choices can be difficult. Now, there are apps that can help people learn about the food they eat to improve their health and their dining out experience.

    Open Table app

    Open Table app helps people choose restaurants when they want to go out to eat. It is a free service that shows users restaurant available based on where and when they want to dine. It gives users points when they make reservations(预定), which can add up to discounts on restaurant visits.

    Max McCalman's Cheese&Wine Pairing app

    Wine and cheese can be a great combination. But which wines go best with which cheeses? Max McCalman's Cheese&Wine Pairing app can help. It provides information about hundreds of different cheeses and suggests wines to pair with each. Max McCalman's Cheese&Wine Pairing app is free.

    HappyCow app

Vegetarians do not eat animal meat. Vegans do not eat any animal products. The HappyCow app is made for both groups. Users can search for vegetarian-vegan restaurants and stores around the world.

    LocalEats app

    Restaurant chains, like McDonalds, can be found almost anywhere a person might travel. But sometimes travelers want to eat like locals. The LocalEats app is designed for that. It can help you find local restaurants in major cities in the US and in other countries. It costs about a dollar.

    Where Chefs Eat app

    "Where Chefs Eat" is a 975-pagc book. Most people would not want to carry that around. But there is a much lighter app version of the same name for just $15. Six hundred chefs provide information on 3,000 restaurants around the world on the Where Chefs Eat app.