A lot of restaurants sell food that isn't actually much different from the sort you'd buy in many western Chinese restaurants. It's pretty much all rice and noodle based, with an assortment of vegetables and whichever meat you've chosen in whichever flavour.

We went to one restaurant where they cook the food at your table. Each table has a hole in the middle of it where some extremely hot coals are placed and a chef comes over to cook your choice of food right there in front of you. All the assorted flavours you might want are at the table ready for you to season the freshly cooked meat yourself. Soy sauce (naturally), chilli's, pepper, MSG (again, naturally), flavoured oils, you name it. The idea of this is that once the meat is cooked you can do one of two things; eat it immediately alongside your chosen dishes of vegetables, bean curds, bamboo etc, or dunk it into any one of the assorted seasonings for as little or as long as you desire and then eat it. Either way, I found it to be immensely tasty.

Washing the food down with a suitable alcoholic beverage is an excellent idea (in my opinion at least) and the Chinese provide handsomely. Their beers don't taste all that different from western lagers, a good one Hannah and I carefully sampled a bucket load of recently was a bottled brew called Tsing Tao, very refreshing and provides the consumer with a hangover to rival many European beers. They also have refreshing non-alcoholic drinks (although quite why you'd want to drink these when a tasty beer is available is beyond me) in the form of what I have called wheat juice. It tastes and smells almost exactly like proper beer, has a nicely foaming head that begs you to get a spoon and eat it up and comes in a nice pitcher just like the beers do. The only differences being that there is not a drop of alcohol in there and it is a bright, almost neon green colour. I found it particularly annoying when I thought I had ordered a plentiful supply of good beer, only to discover to my horror that it was wheat juice. I also wondered whether my veins were beginning to pulse with a radioactive green colour but thankfully that never happened.

Going to a Chinese fast food establishment also contains plenty of similarities with its western counterparts. However, unlike the fast food places in the western world, the Chinese fast food joints give the customers ceramic dishes to eat from. When you've finished, instead of then throwing the entire contents of your food tray into the bins (or like most people the world over, leave it for one of the employees to clean it for you) you deposit them in a little hole in the wall where a something (most likely an employee) does the necessary for you. It makes these fast food places feel a little more civilised, as well as giving the false impression that you are consuming foods of a wholesome goodness, whereas each person is probably just shovelling the usual fast food combinations of fat, salt and sugar straight into their soon-to-be lardy stomachs.

The enormous benefit of eating and drinking in China is the price. Thinking that the portions would be fairly small, we indulged in a spot of "see how many dishes of food they'll bring us if we keep asking" and to our stomach-rumbling surprise, they only stop when you stop - and by the way, the portions are not small. The same is true with the beers, which flow nicely until you say otherwise. The first time we did this a nasty pang called "Bank Managers Bite" hit us and we were a little worried what the size of the bill was going to be like after we had consumed a herd of cattle and a brewery or two of fine Chinese beer. All told (there is no tipping culture in China, by the way, thank God) it came to approximately £5 each. I almost ordered the same again.