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 …