Creatures of the Night

When one thinks of China, weird food probably tops the list. When my parents visited China 11 years ago to pick up my adpoted sister, Jae, and bring her home, this was one of the things they kept mentioning: the food is so strange! Well, China has Westernized quite a bit in the past 10 years. And on the verge of the Olmypics, their cuisine is getting tamer and tamer. Just recently, a ban was put on dog meat in Beijing, as the government didn't want anyone accidentally ordering Kung Pow Dog. Also, while they sell them at grocery stories, I have yet to see any chicken feet floating in my soup. Of course, they still serve flowered pork kidney and stinkey tofu.

However, there is one place to go to find their weird, the bizzare, the naseous, and somtimes, the suprisingly taste. Wangujing Street by day is a bustling shopping street with numerous malls and department stores (including the main Olympic Store.) But by night, the creatues come out of the woodwork. Wangfujing is the host of the Night Market, which features an wide variety of creepers, crawlers and critters to munch. Silk worms, scorpians, water snake, sea horse, lizzards, starfish are all on the menu. Of course, they have some delicious wontons, flat bread, fruit, shrimp and spring rolls for those with a tamer palatte.

Here was my menu for the evening:
Fried dumplings filled with mystery meat (hopefully chicken)
Spring Roll filled with mushroom, onion and mystery meat (hopefully chicken)
Silk Worm--very crunchy on the outside, mushy on the inside (quickly followed by an entire can of Tsing Tao beer)
Sea Snake--extremely chewy, pretty sure that is was poop tastes like, if I'd ever had poop, which I haven't
Noodles--suprsingly, these made me feel worse of all, as my body still hates noodles after promptly vomitting up airplane food noodles, but to the average noodle eater, I suppose they were pretty good
Another Tsing Tao beer
And another
Scorpian--this was scary to bite in to because I was worried it would poke my mouth, but it tasted kind of like those crispy fried onions that you put on green bean casserole, or maybe a Funion. Yes, that's it. It tasted like a Funion.



Diggin' in to some silk worm. Notice beer in hand, in case of emergency.



I initially thought these were mice. Turns out, they giant shrimp. Or prawns. I guess I don't know the difference.





Piping hot pile of shredded stomach, anyone?