Hey everyone. It’s been a while since my last blog post, and I’m afraid this is probably going to be the last one. So I decided to choose the most important (and most frequently overlooked) aspect of my travels here: food!

And I have photos. As part of our last few days here I decided to go on a tour of the best meals in town, and I enlisted the help of my fellow food enthusiast Briana to help me make it through as many meals as possible over the course of the day. For the last six weeks we’ve been eating out for all of our meals, so I’m confident saying that we are experts about the food options in this town. So here we go!

Our first stop was the Green Hotel Restaurant, one of the more Westerner-friendly spots in town. They make some of the best “hash browns” (fried potatoes) with tons of tasty spies. And if this food looks green it’s because you can sit outside under a big semi-transparent patio roof that just so happens to be, well, green.

Our second stop was the Snow Lion Hotel. Many of the restaurants in town are also hotels, and we frequently visited these primarily because of their rather more robust internet connections. The Snow Lion has the best French toast in town, and we were so excited that we ate half of it before we remembered to take a picture. So just trust me when I say it was tasty.

Stop number three of our rampage was Common Ground, a Chinese and Tibetan place with all kinds of delicious stir fries and soups and meat dishes and so on, where we got this fantastic vegetable and tofu stir fry:

Next up we went to Lung Ta, the only really Japanese place in town and one of the favorites among all members of our group. We ordered the kakiage egg-don, a bowl of rice with a sweet soy sauce and clusters of fried vegetables topped with a fried egg and more delicious sauce. Basically a bowl of awesome.

For our mid-afternoon interlude we stopped at the Tibet Quality Bakery for a Black Forrest brownie, a soft and gooey slab of chocolatey goodness, and took it to the Black Tent café, which has one of the bigger tea selections and the immense virtue of unlimited hot water refills, which lets you stretch your cup of tea into three or more.

And as an added bonus you can play a game of Bananagrams while you wait:

Our next stop was Mama’s kitchen/the JJI café, a tiny establishment featuring momos (dumplings) and thenthuk (noodle soup) made with whole wheat dough. We opted for a bowl of the latter with lots of tofu, vegetables, and egg mixed in. Very tasty stuff to warm your toes on a rainy monsoon night.

For our last dinner session we visited Gakyi, and all-vegetarian and supposedly healthy Tibetan food place. We may have slightly downgraded the healthiness of the food offerings when we selected fried spinach and cheese momos and brown fried rice, but we certainly had no regrets except that the darkness of the location didn’t make for the best photos.

The final stop on our journey was Café Ri, a Korean food place with alright food but an exceptional selection of deserts. Our favorite and our choice this evening was a brownie Sunday made with real vanilla ice cream (harder to come by here than you might expect) drizzled with chocolate sauce. A perfect way to finish an excellent day of eating way too much delicious food, although I admit this photo does not do it justice.

I hope this has given you a taste of our food eating experiences over the last few weeks, though unfortunately only a visual one. As I mentioned before this will most likely be my last blog post as I am returning to the U.S. in about two days. I hope you have enjoyed reading!