Cantonnes of Concrete

This "special administrative region" post comes hot on the heels of a whirlwind voyage through the Cantonese super cities of Hong Kong and Guangzhou (Canton to some). Hot being the operative word too; it is about 30 degrees and 99% humidity in this neck of the woods each day and night, converting you to a walking sweat factory within seconds of leaving your air conditioned city hovel. You can walk around the streets, dreaming of cold rain all you want, instead the only showers you'll receive are from drip drying clothes and air conditioning units above as far as the eye can see.

I'll start first with the accommodation: the (in?)famous "Chunkhing Mansions", where seemingly every other cheap traveler in the city goes. When reviews of your accommodation include statements such as "ignore the blood on the walls in the stairwell, it's actually pretty safe", you know you're onto a budget winner. Needless to say it's not worth spending a great deal of time hanging around the hostel enjoying the surroundings. Unless you're interested in buying a cheap "Rolax" watch or being fitted for a tailored suit.

Hong Kong, due to it's British colonial heritage and western influence feels very much like an Australian city on steroids to me. It sports things other Chinese cities can only dream of such as an incredible metro system (complete with London-style "Mind the Gap" warnings!), recycling bins everywhere, a relatively high level of public order and consideration, a lack of spit and (disappointingly) predominantly correct English translations (although the word "fook" comes up enough times to make me giggle). All in all it's a pretty sanitised and slick Asian experience, but whatever you do, don't hire a car. You'll probably want to gouge your eyes out with chopsticks while battling endless armies of Toyota Crown taxi's and Jetson's sounding bikes to go anywhere. And everyone knows better than to get involved in a land war in Asia, even if it's just a traffic one.

Ultimately why would you drive anyway when the city has gigantic escalators throughout AND you get metro credits for walking! Kick ass!

Actually, while I am on the topic of cars, they drive on the left side of the road in Hong Kong, but on the right side in mainland China. I wonder if they meet each other head on and pile up in endless destruction at the border? I guess not, but the slapstick comedy potential in the scenario is too big to ignore for this blog writer.

Anyway...

For a city as effortlessly cosmopolitan and advanced as Hong Kong you still see glimpses of Asian-ness shining through. Walking through the city in the morning is like walking through the Matrix due to the number of people moving in Tai Chi slow motion, in the evening tiny little ramshackle snack huts permeate the cracks of the histogram-like skyline, there are monks walking around the streets trying to bless people for cash, there are vines and weeds threatening to reclaim the city in a few days if not held at bay, gleaming sky scrapers under construction are still surrounded with ever precarious bamboo scaffolding. There is certainly enough of Asia there to give you a taste, but it's covered up pretty well in modernity.

On the other side of the Shenzen boundary is Guangzhou. Another megalopolis, but with a distinctly more mainland China flavour. This place is definitely an architect's wet dream compared to Hong Kong however as it appears to be some sort of sand pit for trying out new and wildly funky building designs, all in the same spot. It was fortunate to visit during the mid autumn full moon festival where people hit the streets in droves to walk around, look at the moon and eat a lot. Especially mooncakes, sometimes filled with raisins, sometimes with white lotus paste, sometimes with pork jelly. The latter was experienced at a family dinner with a friend. It was a real honour to attend, leaving with epic bags of tea that will probably be destroyed by Australian customs.

Now I am aware that I spent basicially an entire blog post previously talking about the weird and wonderful foods encountered, but it was probably premature to go to press given Canton had not been encountered yet. They well and truly eat anything here ... in fact they have a proud saying, "If it has legs and it is not the table, if it has wings and it is not a plane, if it has fins and is not a boat or submarine, the Cantonese will eat it."

From black medicine jelly made from turtles that supposedly helps clear throat phlegm (a common problem as you would know by now), dried crispy fish skin, seaweed dessert, weird noodle soup made with the famous "thousand year old egg", fried chicken feet, steamed cakes and bread, horse lungs to "Pheonix milk" - Canton has it all. Here I was thinking the Pheonix was just an imaginary animal, not so, it's very real. And it produces milk, apparently.

If you don't feel like fantastical bird milk, you can drink copious tea here. In fact this is arguably where it all started for China in terms of tea drinking so naturally making tea is a complex, ancient ceremony and pretty serious business. Making tea involves pouring hot water OVER the tea pot to warm it up, then pouring hot water into the tea pot, pouring the first tea brew into your cups but just using it to warm and wash them, throw that first brew out, pour hot water in the pot again, scoop off the bubbles at the top, pour hot water over the pot to clean it, pour the second brew into the cups - getting each last drop and alternating between each cup per drop rapidly. Overall it's a wet and convoluted process, but very special and cool. I for one certainly feel shortchanged with the crappy tea bag experience back home.

Before I wrap this up, I should make a special mention here about how impossibly difficult learning Sino-Tibetan languages is. Mainly because of the concept of using tone/pitch to change the meaning of words - a concept that is completely foreign to Westerners where tone/pitch is used to denote questions or emphasis. Get the wrong tone and you have just said a totally different word, making your sentence complete gibberish. People don't seem to be able to join the gaps either if you get the wrong tone, meaning blank stares a plenty are waiting for you.

Reading the script is even more difficult given there many thousands to remember - although I am told you really only need a few thousand to "get by". Some of them are pretty easy as they almost look like what they represent, thus it is easy to make up mental stories for them. But not are all like this. Here are some examples below ... I provide a story for each one to help you remember it, as you go down the list it demonstrates how progressively tenuous and desperate this technique becomes.

火 = fire

It looks like a little fire with some embers flying off it.

山 = mountain

It looks like a mountain with three peaks.

油 = oil (edible)

It's a little olive tree with a barrel of olive oil next to it.

麵 = noodles

This is a little noodle stand on the right, with an absolute mess of noodles to the left.

恨 = hate

The little dude on the left hates it when someone breaks the leg of his exercise equipment and then doesn't bother to fix it properly, instead just leaning it on the broken leg.

钍 = Thorium

Erm, it kind of looks like a chemistry set, with some ... umm ... Thorium on it. Yeah, that's it.

豬 = pig

It looks like maybe, erm, ahh, FRACK IT ... I give up.

Their Ping Pong, Their Zen, Their Ying and Yangese

I’m not sure if I mentioned it, but there are a lot of people in China. Whether they be farming tea for the world or farming gold for the world of Warcraft they will sooner or later need to travel from A to B. When they do they will form your competition for any mode of cheap transport, this makes getting tickets for anywhere a real challenge all the time. Buses are generally the easiest tickets to get hold of, and for good reason; they have a certifiably horrendous safety record. It’s not difficult to imagine why either having now travelled on them several times; the drivers weave roads the size of runways like they are driving a rally car, not a 20 tonne bus. The sheer amount of good luck charms hanging off the mirror also don’t do much for your confidence and in reality simply end up interfering with the driver’s vision and hitting him in the head. On top of all of this, you’ll have to mentally deal with the fact that there is a “spit bucket” on the bus sitting beside you so that folk can carry on coughin' up phlegm during the trip.

If you don’t like the bus idea, you can try the train however these are typically impossible to get tickets for unless you book days or sometimes weeks in advance. When you book you can choose from several types of tickets: there is the legendary “Soft Sleeper” which is akin to a golden Wonka bar. I have never seen anyone acquire this ticket; it represents a level of comfort most westerners might recognise, but ticket scalpers clean those out the moment the train tickets become available and then charge like a wounded bull for them. Next up is the “Hard Sleeper” ticket, which is a bed that is in an open hallway, this is probably the best way to travel you can get though you will have to deal with a complete lack of storage for luggage and strangers deciding they will sit on the end of you bed “for just a little while”. Next you have “Hard Seat” which means you have a seat to sit in. This sounds OK but again you’ll be crammed into a tiny room with a lot of people and luggage for typically over twelve hours. Lastly you have “Standing” which is exactly as it says on the tin, you are allowed to board the train and then it’s up to you to find a nice place to stand for the entire trip.

Naturally you will want to sit down at some point though, for this you have three options; sit on a little stool that you bring with you, sit on the ground in a sea of used hot pot noodle packets and other garbage, or weasel your way onto the end of a bed and pretend to be deaf. In any case you’ll be guaranteed to block a through-way and have to shuffle yourself around constantly to let people through for twelve hours.

If you are extremely lucky (and in a big city), you can catch one of China’s sleek, high speed trains which are springing up throughout the country everywhere. These are amazing though don’t get too comfortable; you see they seem to like everyone to face forwards on the train and that means when the train pulls into a station and then heads back out in reverse you will need to spin your entire seat row around on it’s base to face forwards again. There is no warning for this in English either, so that means all of your food, books and other stuff you have connected to the seat in front of you is about to go bye-bye unless you can pile it all into your lap fast.

There is also the fancy-schmancy maglev train that hits 450+kph. In what is probably the greatest example of ironic, economic contrast, these things glide effortlessly over impoverished rural countryside via monstrous rail viaducts with velodrome-like corners. The experience is definitely one of a kind, seriously scary when you pass another train and probably the nearest I will get to driving a Bugatti Veyron at top speed. Oh and if you ever ride one and want to take a photo of it, take a photo BEFORE the train leaves the station fresh, not AFTER it has arrived and is now covered in bird blood.

At the complete other end of the speed spectrum, if you are in the city and have a carefree view on your personal safety, you can opt to hire a rickshaw transport. This is typically a ramshackle bike come wheelbarrow driven by a man or woman with disproportionately thick legs and an arse of steel. The rickshaw adventure is always guaranteed to excite as you ply traffic resembling more of an asteroid field then a flowing river. Don’t forget your ear plugs too, truck and bus horns are at your ear level and it’s pretty much guaranteed you will be in their way all the time.

The other thing you will notice at ground level in the rickshaw is just how many bikes there are on the roads in China, it even puts Amsterdam to shame. It’s absolutely nuts to see what people carry on their bikes with them too, everything from a one year old baby on their lap to a box or bag that is three times wider than the bike. Personal protection is pretty much optional and, even if present, usually a whimsical façade. I saw one guy on a motorbike wearing a toy plastic “Bob the Builder” helmet for protection as a great example.

Now, imagine all this transport (bikes, cars, trucks, whatever) kicking it across China every day. Add to this the fact that China, by being the ‘workshop of the world’ has massive amounts of industrial by products being pumped into the air. Add more smoke for crop and garbage burning. Chuck in seemingly endless burning of incense and napkins in temples, firecrackers for any event and cigarette smoking as a national sport for good measure and you have a level of air pollution that figuratively and literally takes your breath away.

The smog here is so serious it actually makes it difficult to breathe on hot days, acid rain is a legitimate fear and it’s normally impossible to see the horizon. In the north it gets even worse as there are massive coal mines and refineries everywhere. In fact when we caught a bus from Beijing to Datong, we descended from the mountains into a yellow haze, into which the silhouettes of metal factories and steam stacks rose amid flames and columns of smoke. I thought for a moment this certainly had to be the exact same industrial inspiration Tolkien had found for Mordor.

At some point you just begin to accept that this pollution is everywhere and it’s not going away. It’s a sad moment when you make peace with the smog; when you realise that seeing more than a few hundred metres is a fantasy, when you realise that visions of splendid sunsets are folly and that you can look directly into the pinkish sun without fear for retina damage. On top of this, at some point you also make peace with the endless hordes of Asian tour groups at every possible interesting thing to see. Only once you have shed the shackles of unrealistic expectations of peace and tranquillity, are you free to appreciate what China has to offer in the sightseeing department. And trust me, that offering is plenty, China is so jam-packed full of absolutely stunning things to see that I could easily induce suicide in you if I described it all in detail, so I’ll just describe a little about the top highlights.

First up is China’s Mongolian Maginot; the Great Wall. It’s a must see when you come to China and deservedly so. Originally the goal was to venture to a remote and original section of the wall at Simitai, however it was closed so instead a more restored section at Mutianyu was the fallback. It was never-the-less exceptionally impressive, the way the wall hugs the contours of the mountain escarpment is beyond words and walking along it gives you the feeling you are in some sort of MC Escher painting with a weaving path and stairs at all sorts of weird angles. The “viewable from space” thing may have been revealed to be BS but the scale of this structure can only be seen to be believed. As icing on the cake, you can ride a slalom kart from the top of the wall to the bottom too: bizarre.

Second on the kick-ass list is Pingyao, a perfectly intact/restored ancient Chinese walled town. The cobbled streets are lined with intricately carved wooden houses, roofed with black tiles and lit by red lanterns. You can enter many of the houses too to see wonderful interiors sometimes three or four courtyards deep. Here is also China’s first bank and a superlative example of a traditional government house complete with an old style prison. Used in countless movies, I guarantee you that Pingyao is exactly the vision of a medieval Chinese town you probably have in your head and so much more.

Third is Huangshan. I can’t convey how spectacular this mountain is. It is comprised of an unfathomable complex of jagged granite massifs each covered in oriental pine trees and vines. Up in the mountain, otherworldly mist swirls in and around you from every direction, constantly revealing new summits and masking the ground far below in a rolling sea of cloud. From cable cars that span jaw-dropping chasms to paths that are little more than slabs of stone sticking out of a cliff, you’ll be clenching your rectum continuously in fear and astonishment. It’s absolutely ethereal, feels about as close to heaven on Earth as you can get and therefore no wonder that so much Chinese nature art is based on this mountain. It’s the most beautiful mountain I certainly have ever ascended and one thing you could never see enough times.

Fourth are the old traditional Huishui villages such as Hongcun, Xidi and Mukheng. The first is a stunning collection of stone homes laid out around a river in a quite odd way, the second is a maze of ancient homes and temples, the latter a farm village in the middle of a gently swaying bamboo forest. Actually the bamboo forest fighting scenes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon were filmed here though the closest you can come to jumping from treetop to treetop (as in the movie) is a super cool flying fox ride over the forest canopy.

Lastly is Shanghai. OK, It may be rammed with foreigners, the street food average, the traditional food sickly sweet, the prices the highest in China and it may not feel anything like the rest of China, but it is certainly an amazing city. Millions of people squeeze around a beautiful mix of architectural heritage from former colonial times to mind-blowing, state of the art skyscrapers built on a solid foundation of Starbucks cafes. You can go to the top of the highest building, the financial centre, via a super rapid 400 metre elevator ascent where due to a lack of loud music you’ll hear a symphony of twenty people swallowing constantly to pop their ears. From the top, perched upon the world’s highest viewing platform, one can see an overwhelming view of this bewildering, vertical city and, after sunset, watch the city come to life in a nebula of Bladerunner-esque neon screens and see the endless traffic on the roads transform into rivers of fire.

China is a noodle bowl full of culture shock, but it’s seriously extraordinary to be part of. It’s easy to see why the Mandarin name for China quite literally means ‘the centre of the world’, there really is so much history, so much to see, learn, eat and do. It’s eye-opening and unforgettable. It’s most certainly not easy travel; there is much population, gastronomic discomfort and pollution to overcome … but exploration and willingness to throw oneself in head first will be rewarded handsomely. 

Ultimately though remember this, if everyone in China jumps at the same time they can knock the planet out of orbit. So show a bit of respect to the Chinese folk next time you visit your local China town. Once you get to know them, they’re cute, cuddly and eager to please.

Maoism, Taoism, I Ching, and Chess

There is nothing Chinese folk like more than to flex their mind playing a game over some good tea in a peaceful park or on the street next to a motorway. There is no shortage of cool games (or tea for that matter) to pick from either. Chinese Chess is probably the most common way to pass the time and it seems to be critical that when you take an opponent’s piece that you do so with gusto. Next most popular are card games, we don’t recognise many of them but they all seem to involve slamming cards down on the table so hard that they fly off it regularly. Chinese Checkers is also popular and again, taking pieces requires considerable theatric effect to be acceptable.

Probably the coolest game however is Mahjong. In the west this is usually played as a really basic memory based game with all the tiles in a stack, but the proper rules are something entirely different. I have to say it’s one of the most interesting and tactical games I have played that combines observation, strategy and interestingly, reflexes. The “simple” version merely has enough rules of battle to make Sun Zu proud, it can get more and more complex based on your desired level of self-masochism.

One of the nicest places to generally chill out and play games are the gorgeous temples dedicated to Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism across China. Most of these were unfortunately trashed pretty heavily in the cultural revolution, but a handful have survived and they are perfectly tranquil and relaxing places in the ever bustling cities of this land. Inside they have cute little gardens and intricately carved stone channels through which water streams flow into big ponds filled with fish. Interestingly they use the same flowing water channel concept in the toilet too, which means as you squat you might also see some number two’s from the cubicle next to you flow past underneath you. God help you if you drop something ... in fact Confucious once said "Man who drop watch in toilet now have shitty time."

These temples also usually have big cool bells and big drums to play on, probably much to the ire of the monks when I bang out another rendition of “the Shredder Suite”.

The monks in these temples, as you probably picture them, are sedate and peaceful men cruising around gorgeous temples in funky coloured robes. Apparently now though the monastic life also involves blessing foreigners and then demanding ridiculous sums of money for doing so. If you don’t pay then some horrible misfortune will befall your family / your business will fail / hell will swallow the Earth whole. So basically monks are best avoided, lest your wallet experience true “enlightenment” well before you ever will.

An important part of Buddhism is to burn incense sticks when you pray to Buddha, the size of the incense stick must have some correlation to the size of the demand or wish in the prayer. Consequently there are ridiculously big incense sticks available at all temples, some almost two metres high. They can only be lit using a raging inferno and once lit, produce so much smoke that the prayer-maker usually asphyxiates slightly mid prayer, only barely stumbling to the incense cauldron in time to desperately throw it in the sand. If that’s not enough, you can grab a bundle of serviettes/napkins and burn those too, or some paper, or a small flag, or some rubbish … whatever. Buddha likes you to burn stuff.

I call the incense holders cauldrons but I am sure they each have some ultra-fancy name, temples always have imposing names for every various site of importance within. Some of my favourites include the “Supreme Earthly Tranquillity Palace”, the “Gate of Military Prowess”, the “Hall of Mental Cultivation”, the “Pavilion of Joyful Longevity”, the “Great Pillar of Heavenly Purity” and the “Cloud Dispelling Pagoda”. Mountains also benefit from most excellent names like “Floating Mound Peak”, “Fairy Capital Peak”, “The Flower Grown Out of a Writing Brush Rock”, “Beginning to Believe Peak”, “The Eighteen Arhats Worshipping at South Sea”, “Double Cock Peak” and my favourites “Immortal Walking on Stilts”, “Immortal Overturns the Desk” and “Immortal Solarise Boots”.

Quite a few temples have been visited now, and at the risk of temple overload, but there is one temple that I’ve been looking forward to for a looong time and many of you will know why based on my personal yearning for dodgy 1970’s Kung Fu films … the Shaolin Temple.

Now, I’m no stranger to Kung Fu; I’ve been watching these flicks for years and I had already formed a vision in my mind of what to expect. Just like a throwback to feudal China I was expecting we would have to be constantly on guard; everyone would know Kung Fu and your status in society is measured by your skill. A simple greeting should therefore involve testing someone’s Kung Fu out, in fact even greeting a long lost friend is best done by launching into a rapid succession of kicks and punches. Perhaps next time you meet an old acquaintance for coffee, try to do a flying kick to their head rather than a handshake or a hug and show them how cultured this blog has made you.

Anyway, that’s what I expected from Shaolin, what we got was a bunch of monks who walked very slowly and greeted each other and tourists with a little bow. No instant all out attacks to be seen at all. I was perturbed, how could you get to know someone without testing their Kung Fu?

The next thing I expected was to see monks fighting each other everywhere using a whole host of perplexing and highly inefficient Kung Fu forms with cool names like “Eagle Claw”, “Hooked Hand”, “Drunken Buddha”, “Furious Buddha”, “Crazy Buddha”, “Iron Monkey Style”, “Cicada Style”, “Crab Style”, “Antelope”, “Dragons Tail”, “Holy Ghost Fist” and the literally impossible “Walking on Air”. Furthermore, true masters of Kung Fu should be able to combine two or more of these styles at the same time, such as “Right hand, five fingers of pain!” and “Left hand, Buddha palm descending from heaven!”, announcing which techniques will be used before the fight lest they suffer the shame of the opponent identifying them mid-fight and stealing their thunder.

I didn’t see any of these styles BUT I was selected to train with a monk and learn some Kung Fu. I think they were just excited to have a foreigner volunteer to them for it, but as Confucious says "A turtle can only make progress when it sticks it's neck out."

Now do note that my only previous training up to this point was hours of endless frustration at being unable to defeat Bison in Streetfighter 2 on the hardest difficulty setting with Chun Li. I was thus nervous and a little tense I have seen how training occurs in Kung Fu films; I expected an old Kung Fu master sporting a long wispy beard and a bald head to begin by beating the living shit out of me while berating me verbally until I felt worthless. I was expecting that he would continually eat chicken in front of me while all I had was cold rice. I expected to be deprived of sleep and make to walk up and down countless steps. Only once my soul was mercilessly crushed would I be ready to absorb his , or failing that he might expedite teaching if he got his ass handed to him in a fight and wanted me to go on a murderous revenge rampage for him.

What I actually got was an eight year old monk who came up to my waist. He was lithe and fast, he rolled around a lot and jumped through the air way too easily for my liking. He spoke no English so I learnt the basics of what I can only determine to be “Hungry Toad Style” via awkward mimicry. Apparently the most important part of this style is to suck your cheeks in and make funny faces each time you stop for a breath – which for me was quite often. It was all very entertaining to watch I am told and I have a video of it that I am sure will haunt me until I die.

The next thing I expected to see was priceless artefacts that would confer all sorts of wonderful martial arts to people who steal them. I looked forward to seeing the nine jade Buddha’s of Shaolin that would bestow incredible resilience to pain, the twenty four robot horses that “teach” undefeatable Kung Fu, the eighteen bronze bells of Shaolin that once mastered (somehow) allow a warrior to develop new styles of Kung Fu at will. Each of these should be guarded by an old Kung Fu expert, tethered to them as a type of crappy security system.

Instead the actual temple just had lots of stairs, houses, incense pots, prayer halls and a shop. It appeared all so woefully practical. The ceramic shop even looked like it had not been trashed in years – highly unlikely in any Kung Fu heavy temple I know!

Lastly, when Kung Fu happened, I expected to hear sound effects and see gore. When you punch or kick and connect with your target it should sound like a broom hitting a wall, when you fail to connect it should sound like a broom hitting a curtain. If you connect, especially using an index finger to the neck or chest, humans should be revealed to be nothing more than fragile, walking balloons of blood. If death is not instantaneous, I expected some old dude on the side to yell out “FINISH HIM” Mortal Kombat style.

In practice there was no of time sound and when sparring partners connected, the target usually stayed down and needed time to recover. It all just seemed so firmly planted in reality ... Shaolin was awesome though I can’t help but feel my dodgy Kung Fu movie virginity has been taken from. If only someone had warned me.

A Fourteen, a Seven, a Nine, and Lychees

I probably mentioned, but China has a LOT of people. Each day they overflow from their houses onto the street in droves where it seems as if all the vast majority do is smoke, shout at something, scratch their head, throw some liquid on the sidewalk, spit on the sidewalk, hold a sack twice their size over their shoulder, sleep in awkward poses or play cards / chess / mah-jong. In between these crowds are small stalls or wheelbarrows of steaming weird foods. It’s the weird food that I intend to focus on here so hold onto your chopsticks.

As travels move from Russia to Mongolia to China, the concept of normality in day to day food has been gradually shifting further away and now finally hit clean out of the ballpark. Sure you might think you can get some noodles in China easily enough right? Not so! Noodles are a side dish for the main ingredient of the bowl and good luck working out what the main ingredient is; the “English” menus can get seriously creative with their prose. For example, what would you order if you were presented with the menu list below?

• The hand grasps the beef (block)
• Cold food in sauce donkey body part
• Stir fried rape (with mushroom)
• The Chinese matrimony vine cooks the ox bit
• Five big ticket items
• Fennel cattle lumbar series
• Likely long Chinese ear food yam
• Boils in its own broth without soy the bulls penis
• Meat depends on same place surface
• Paste mixed with water and sorghum flour
• The corn flour boils swelling or lump on the skin
• The wheat flour rubs the fish hands
• Clutches the piece of ping yao
• Artificial dough like ear cats
• Bean flour hair oil bullish mound fights
• Picking sorghum flour with a stick

Easy choice indeed ... now, up the ante and imagine that the waiter is standing over you from the very moment you sit down with the menu, tapping their pen in boredom as if saying “what’s the matter, the menu is in English, order already!”. Inevitably you end up with something, but not what you hoped for … if you hoped for anything.

The only way to avoid the lucky dip is to find a restaurant with pictures on the menu though even these can be blurred beyond comprehension or completely wrong. Ultimately, the best way is to hit the street markets; this is where food gets real and the point and nod selection technique can be deployed to great effect. These street food markets are testimony to the fact Chinese will eat anything that moves; especially if it can be impaled on a stick and fried. Lotus root, chicken hearts, sheep kidneys, snakes, silk worms, centipedes and more are all fair game. If your stomach is not fazed yet then that’s brilliant, in this case you might be one of the few ready to fork out serious dosh for other great delicacies on a stick such as sheep penis, sea urchin, starfish, seahorse, crickets, cicadas, tarantulas, baby sharks, baby chickens and scorpions … really big, mean, black scorpions. Anything is fair game here, so long as it satisfies the “on a stick” requirement. 

Oh, those scorpions are moving too by the way, freshness is paramount when you are eating something with a venom sac apparently.

Some of the more delicious food that doesn’t involve sticks includes a myriad of dumplings (some fried, some steamed, some boiled, some resembling gelatinous gunk), fried persimmon and sesame seed patties, Pingyao dried beef (corned beef as far as I can tell), flame roasted chilli and herb bread, Xian pudding (some sort of rice on two skewers dipped in some red, sweet beans), moon cakes (little cakes that impractically disintegrate into a shower of pastry flakes as you eat them) and weird Chinese pie things filled with peas and spinach and some other stuff. I think that last one was another type of dumpling, but who really knows for sure, I certainly don’t.

A definite highlight meal is the classic Chinese hot pot; the waiter brings out a gigantic big copper pot to your table with hot coals in the bottom that make a little moat of insanely spicy broth to simmer away above. Into this lava you dip various pieces of largely indistinguishable meat and vegetables and after a few minutes you frantically try to fish them out of the bubbling heat with chopsticks. From there you quench them in a waiting cooling pond of garlic oil sauce before numbing your face with their newfound chilli-like qualities. The whole hot pot experience is a lot of fun and quite social as you spend a lot of time talking while fishing for the bit of meat you just lost in the hot pot.

In Beijing, one can't go past another classic dish; Peking Duck. In fact “you have not experienced Peking Duck or Beijing if you have not had Peking Duck in Beijing”. Makes sense, but with a grandiose statement like I knew our food posse had to find a good venue for the cause and the Michelin guide delivered. We enjoyed a duck cooked to absolute perfection in a little Hutong (alleyway) restaurant that a local had to walk us 15 minutes into the ‘burbs to find. The experience was authentic through and through, firstly you order and then if you are lucky (or unlucky) happen to run into your chef in the hallway who happens to be carrying a freshly killed duck by the neck. Next time you see the duck it is on a platter, basted and cooked to a brilliant orange. When you think you are done for, they deliver all the rest of the left over duck bits to your table, super crispy and ready to gnaw on. It’s extremely satisfying, but if you didn’t get around to hacking a duck apart in a restaurant during your visit to Peking you can still take home a pre-cooked “Peking duck in a bag” from almost any shop in town. It’s bizarre and probably only slightly less horrifying then the popular “whole chicken in a can”.

If the plastic poultry sacks don’t freak you, the eggs will. China has lots and lots of eggs; all different colours, all different sizes, all different ages. Yes that’s right, ages. Sure fresh eggs are healthy and normally free of salmonella, but why take all the fun out of eating eggs when you can have “the thousand year old egg”. It’s not really THAT old, but it’s well past the use by date and a major favourite over here. The sight of it is scary, the smell is pretty much guaranteed to make you stumble in your tracks whilst your eyes burst (imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger on the surface of Mars in Total Recall if you will).

Actually, the fermented fish they love to cook as a snack round here will do that to you too. I personally remember this from Indonesia and, despite the whole gamut of strange stuff eaten, it’s something I can NEVER get used to.

Next up on the menu is candy. China is littered with candy shops that sell either hand stretched ginger candy, sesame seed and nuts that have been hit repeatedly by sweaty men with mallets, or a mind boggling assortment of little sweets in non-descript foil packets. You are urged to randomly pick a few to try in most stores and each time is a taste revelation, sometimes with a weird meaty twang, that cannot even be correlated to something else eaten before. The Chinese folk adore all these sweets, buying them up in gigantic bags of blood sugar level exploding goodness for the folk back home.

Another culinary staple you cannot avoid here is the two minute pot noodle. Normally the bastion of poor students worldwide, cook in the plastic pot noodles are absolutely massive here and form the core culinary ration of all Chinese travelers. They come in a variety of flavours reminiscent of Soylent products and ultimately all seem to be laced with prodigious amounts of chilli ensuring any train or bus you take will soon be laden with heady, eye watering aromas.

So what is there to drink round these parts? Well, there is a large range of juice drinks with unpredictable flavours and a kazillion flavours of iced tea, but the one drink every person in China seems to have at their side is not something you buy in a shop – it’s homemade moonshine tea. People make their own special tea brews at home and carry it around by their side in glass or plastic jars that look like they have been to hell and back. These jars reveal all and you can see that there is not only tea leaves in there but sometimes some spices, bits of plants, seeds, roots, flowers, nuts – essentially whatever was at hand at the time when the brewing was underway. Sometimes these drinks look like a beverage prop out of the Mos Eisley cantina.

So you might wonder how to not die after eating all of these U.E.O’s (Unidentified Edible Objects)? The answer is simple – Chinese rice wine. After every dubious meal, down a shot of this mind warping stuff, guaranteed to kill anything in your stomach and beyond. It smells like paint stripper, it tastes like cough medicine and is the liquid embodiment of the nine pits of hell … and so far it seems to be working. Fingers crossed this alcohol’s mystical powers continue to protect.

Incidentally, it is very difficult to give people tips here, freakishly difficult. You can leave a tip at a restaurant and they will come running after you with the money as if you left it behind. You can’t get taxi drivers to round up, you can’t get shop keepers to keep the change – everyone feels they must give you your change or they think they are ripping you off somehow. Basically, their business ethics are pretty good and it turns out that Tipping really isn’t a city in China.

Food aside, China is a great place to come shopping for anything …. and I mean anything. There is a lot of cheap Chinese products in every country in the world but they only export a small percentage of their wares overseas, so you can imagine just how much crap is for sale here! The markets look like a truck just dumped everything in an alleyway and a person just happen to be underneath it, that person, when they dig their way to the surface just starts arranging it haphazardly on whatever space they have and selling what they can before more boxes of stuff are dumped on them.

Out of all the products on offer however, my personal favourites are T-shirts with attempts at English on the front. Pretty much no one here can read what the shirt says so the shirt manufacturers don’t really have to try to get the words right. The text therefore ranges from absolute gibberish resembling an optometrist eye test to “cool” quotes and slogans that make absolutely no sense whatsoever. I love reading these things on people as they walk past but it’s been a little awkward on more than one occasion being caught staring at a woman’s shirt trying to decipher the absolute nonsense printed across her breasts.

My next favourite Engrish is in advertising. In China, using every possible colour in the rainbow, the Photoshop saturation slider set to 255, over the top animation and/or clipart is not enough to sell an expensive product; the use of English is required to take the product name or ad to a much greater level of sophistication … regardless of how crap or wrong that English is. They can be major products such as “Infant Formula Alcohol”, some sort of service company such as “Commoner Love” or small local businesses such as “Farm Soil and Donkey Meat Restaurant”.

The worst example of Engrish however is on museum and sightseeing information boards. You would think that before you go and carve a translation into a gigantic polished marble block, you would double check the translation and maybe do a spell check too. It’s hilariously tragic to see Engrish immortalised forever in stone.

Alas, this entry must now cometh to an end. My fortune cookies tell me however that it most certainly won’t be the last from China … with some distance to go and more oddities to uncover, things are just heating up. I haven’t even got started on Kung Fu yet …