Beautiful, beautiful Xinjiang.

We got off the train at 7:30am in Urumqi and went straight to the hotel. Urumqi was our first encounter into the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (the name of the province), and immediately the differences were apparent. First, everything was bilingual – all the signs were in Chinese and also the Uyghur language, which is written in an Arabic text. Then, of course, the people were different, about one in every three people were Uyghur and looked very different from the ethnic Han Chinese – they had bigger eyes and darker skin. Now, the Uyghurs have been trying to get their independence from China for several decades, to a similar degree but much less publicized than the Tibetan push for independence, but the Chinese government responded by pushing more and more ethnically Han Chinese towards the area, essentially diluting their population and their culture, and offering little hope for independence. I’m not sure if there’s a racial divide between the two – I didn’t witness any – but you’d have to think there’d be a lot of tension given the vast cultural and physical differences between the two. The Uyghur must feel some sense of entitlement the way the Native Americans here probably do, but you wouldn’t know it by what we saw (which is not to say we saw enough, the tour guide made sure of that by wasting our time on the stupid bus).

Our bus didn’t leave Urumqi until 9:30am, despite us all being there at 9 or earlier. Turpan is a mere 183km away from Urumqi (about 110 miles) and theoretically, even if driving slow, should take less than 2 hours to get there. I don’t know what happened, if we took a massive detour or not to visit a historical old town on the way, but we didn’t get there until 2:15pm. Minus the 45 minutes they alloted for the historical town, that’s a total of 4 hours. Which is completely unacceptable. Then, they wouldn’t let us eat lunch, claiming the first three sights were really close together and if we just knocked them out quickly (yup, we were “knocking off” tourist sights on our “vacation”) lunch would be conveniently held afterwards in the main part of town. Because surely the “hassle” of eating lunch would force us off “schedule”. We ended up eating some pastries to let the hunger subside as we were hastily hurried along the first 3 places, being allotted 30 minutes at each place. Thirty minutes is enough to walk through once, maybe read a few sentences, glance at the exhibits and take a picture or two. Seriously? We’ve paid all this money and we’re allowed, like schoolchildren, to go inside for 30 minutes?

The places we went to were actually very interesting and explained a lot about the Uyghur culture. Turpan is a city where 70% of the residents are Uyghur, and is located in the Turpan basin which is the hottest area in China, so many of its attractions are describing elements of the Uyghur culture and their life in the extreme heat. Since it’s a very hot and dry climate, their irrigation system is handled by an extremely elaborate underground canal system called the Karez, which ingeniously brings water to all parts of the Turpan basin through wells that tap into the canals. There was a replica of a Uyghur village, which outlined Uyghur customs and traditions, which all seemed like it was stuck in the 19th century.

  

Underground Karez water irrigation system.

  

Grape vines, the specialty of Turpan.

  

A street in Turpan - dirty and devoid of people.

Like I said earlier, I very much equate the Uyghurs in China to the Native Americans in America. The culture is different, and they seem to enjoy their age-old customs, so much that despite the abundance of technology and modern-age tools, they are content to just live their lives like they’ve always been living. I’m sure nobody’s heard of the Uyghurs before this blog, and I don’t blame you – there’s not one Uyghur in the mainstream, even in China. Their houses are still made of mud. They’re primarily still farmers. Turpan’s not exactly a modernized city, and you get the feeling driving around the town that if there were no tourist attractions and if there was no history to this place, nobody would actually come here. They grow grapes and turn them into raisins. That’s the extent of Turpan and the Uyghur people living there. I suppose in a large city such as Urumqi they can immerse themselves in a more modern environment, but the people living in Turpan would probably never even leave and go to such a place.

  

Typical Turpan abode.

A sign in Turpan with Uyghur text above the Chinese text.

Houses in Turpan amidst the barren terrain.

After our 4:30pm lunch, which was at a ridiculously unsanitary restaurant where flies were everywhere and they cooked a piece of plastic into our dish (for our troubles we were awarded two(!) bottles of water), we headed to a traditional Uyghur home where the host entertained us with traditional songs and dances and we ate fresh watermelon and freshly baked naan bread (similar to the Indian kind but much thicker). We wore traditional Uyghur headdresses and learned a traditional Uyghur dance. This was actually very cool and a perk to the tour, because it wasn’t a tourist spot but rather an actual home where I’m sure the tour company had a deal with to let them take us in (although we did have to pay 20RMB each to participate). We toured their house, sampled their home grown raisins and listened to our host tell us stories. Probably the highlight of the day, but let’s not shed too much praise on the tour – as we left, we saw the tour guide sneak off with a bag of free raisins from the host, presumably a token of thanks for bringing so much business to their house tour. Grrr. So shady!

  

Our Uyghur host conversing with my dad.

Watermelon and naan, a Uyghur feast.

Yup, I joined in the cultural spirit.

Privately grown grapevines from on top of their roof.

By the time we were hurried through a few more meaningless tourist attractions, including a “fire mountain” and a grape vine, we were coerced into going to a wholesale tea store, one specifically built for tourists because they had an information session where they pitched all their products and we were given thirty minutes to walk around the store to see what we wanted to buy. Of course, the tour guide would get a commission for bringing you there. This was part of our tour! We could have spent thirty more minutes somewhere useful and educational but instead we get pitched for some herbal teas. As if we weren’t irritated enough already, this was pretty much the low point of the whole experience. By now it was around 8pm, and while the sun was still high in the sky we knew it would take over 3 hours to get back on the slow bus. We hadn’t eaten dinner and wouldn’t get a chance to until we returned. I mean, who came up with this schedule? At this point I wanted to strangle the tour guide. I was THAT angry.

The whole way back to Urumqi we were trying to figure out alternate plans to going to Tianshan (Heavenly Mountain) tomorrow without the tour group. We did it loudly and obnoxiously on the bus, but didn’t care. By the time we got back it was close to midnight. Thankfully, since the sun sets late in Urumqi, the restaurants are also open late, many until 1am or later. We had a small dinner and then went back to the hotel. Screw the tour, we’re on our own tomorrow. We have the whole day to go to Tianshan and then come back and explore the bazaar, before catching a 7:30pm flight back to Beijing. And glorious, glorious internet, and hopefully a cup of freshly brewed coffee. Mmmm, I can taste it already.

  

Riding camels in the Gobi Desert.

I’ve been looking forward to sand dunes for pretty much the whole trip and they did not disappoint. Thankfully, the wind started picking up and we got the full “Lawrence of Arabia” experience, with huge gusts throwing sand into our faces while riding these huge behemoth creatures across vast expanses of sand. We wore orange shoe mitts that kept the sand out of the shoes (which were surprisingly very effective), and rode all the way to the top of the sand dunes, where we could then slide down on a toboggan or go ride a motorized dune buggy. I did both. Sliding down a sand dune perhaps sounds a LOT more exciting than it actually is. There’s a lot of friction on the sand, so at one point I had to paddle in the sand to actually make it move at all. But as disappointing as that was, the dune buggy was an extremely fun ride, with the wind and the sand blowing in your face as you race over sand hills and making sharp turns and almost falling off several times. And this is why the weather for today was perfect – if the sun was out full force and the wind was calm, it probably would have been as exciting as riding in the backseat of a car in 100 degree weather with the windows up and no air-conditioning. You really needed the cool breeze for the full effect.

  

Nothing but sand.

Camels lounging in the sand.

One tree, meaning oasis up ahead.

Now, despite this being probably the least cultural or educational experience that I’ve done on this whole trip, I actually reveled in the simplicity of being in a place with just one element – sand. There is literally nothing else around. I mean, even when you’re in the middle of the ocean, there’s other natural forms or life around. Even in most deserts, there are stones, rock formations, cacti. But here, only one thing existed naturally, and it didn’t matter that the wind was pushing it all over the place – it was all the same and it will probably never change. It will never freeze and it will never melt away. It probably looked the same 1000 years ago, and will look the same 1000 years from now. It was exhilarating to be a part of this completely unique landscape.

Earlier in the day, we visited the Mogao Caves, which is one of the many formations of the Thousand Buddha Caves, which is how the old Buddhist communities used to live back in the days of the silk road. They would carve out a huge set of dwellings in the side of a mountain, and decorate them with paintings and statues. Except when you get there, it’s nothing like you would think. Everything’s been renovated and reconstructed, and to be frank, it looks more like a hotel than it does an old Buddhist colony. And they won’t let you tour it by yourself, you have to go with a tour guide in a group of at least 20, plus they were super strict about not allowing you to take pictures or even bring a camera inside. So, they pretty much sucked every bit of fun out of this trip, and since the tour guide spoke really fast and used mostly transliterated Buddhist vocabulary, I was fighting the z’s for most of this tour.

  

One of the few photos I managed to sneak in before they started yelling at me and threatened to confiscate my camera. Really?

Thankfully, at the end, there was a little exhibition with English translations and I finally understood what the hell I was looking at. Apparently, this place had been ravaged by foreign archaeologists and scavengers for centuries, and so most of the Buddhist documents once housed here are now diasporically scattered around the world. But that’s about all I understood. There were scriptures in Tibetan, statues of Buddhas with multiple arms (which I always thought was Hinduism, apparently the Tibetan strand of Buddhism is some kind of amalgam of the two), bodhisattva statues (I only know Bodhisattva through the Steely Dan song), and the like. The coolest thing there was this massive 200ft high Buddha statue, where his toenails were the size of your head, nestled in one of the caves where you can’t see it until you get inside the cave, and then all of a sudden it just appears. It seems just about every ancient engineering marvel had something to do with religion. Too bad that isn’t the case today – it would be so cool! Why aren’t people building skyscraper sized Buddhas anymore? Imagine a huge Buddha in the New York skyline. Tell me that wouldn’t be awesome.

RIght now, we’re on the overnight train again, this time to the city of Urumqi, which has at least a little international notoriety to it. It’s known as the city furthest away from any large body of water in the world, which is a cool geographic fact but also probably means we won’t be seeing much seafood. (Score.) We’ll get there at around 7:30 in the morning, which means another night of sleep on this “soft” slab of wood. We’re going to Turpan tomorrow, which is actually a desert town known for their grapes and raisins, with a climate similar to Death Valley. Yesterday there were sandstorms there which caused tourists to be stranded there for the night, but I think that’s all done with and it’ll be nice and cool tomorrow. Or so I hope.

Today was the first day on our tour of the Northwest, starting with the westernmost point of the Great Wall at Jiayuguan Pass. It’s also the first time in over ten years I have been with a tour guide, so to be honest, I was a little apprehensive about the whole thing. Our tour guide met us at the train station, this little woman who couldn’t have been over 30, extremely excited and peppy, which was a nice surprise. And then I found out our group is only 6 people. So, this tour was already going a lot better than expected.

Jiayuguan is a huge city in area with a population of about 200,000 – which is a huge difference from the big cities that I’m used to. There aren’t any people in the streets in the middle of the day, almost no traffic, and about six shops total on any block. It felt like a ghost town compared to where we just were. After breakfast, we were taken to the city gate, the last gate at the western edge of the Great Wall, which acted as the Chinese border during the Ming dynasty. Even at 8:30am, the place was packed to the brim with tourists and tour groups, which I guess I shouldn’t be shocked about, but still, it felt way too crowded. The tour guide went through a well-practiced speech about what we were seeing, although she was speaking way too fast for me to understand, so I just nodded and caught what I could and took a lot of pictures. I’m by no means a Chinese history scholar, so everything was really just going over my head, but I did notice how well-fortified and well-engineered the Jiayuguan Pass was – to the point that they translate it as the “Impregnable Pass at the Great Wall”. Impregnable? Is that the appropriate word for a defense fortification?

  

The main gate at Jiayuguan Pass.

The two gate system means you will not pass.

  

Tourists are ABUNDANT.

There were a lot of little activities you could take part in as part of this tourist extravaganza, and like a good tourist, I did all of them. You could dress up like an imperial guard for 10RMB, which I promptly did and forced my tour group to wait up for. Then at the top of the wall you can do some archery and shoot arrows at a hay dummy for 1RMB per arrow, which I did, and I hit the center of the dummy on my first try. Finally, at the end of the tour you could go ride a horse around a circular track for 10RMB, and of course, why not, I rode a horse around a circular track. I mean, it’s fun and all, but this is kinda the reason I don’t like touristy areas – they lure you in with these fun activities, but why did you travel half way around the world to ride a stupid horse? I wanted to learn more about the history of the place, and very little about the tour is devoted to answering these questions. What we get instead are little anecdotal stories about how swallows couldn’t reenter the main gate after it was closed – proving how impregnable the gate was – or how they had one brick left after building the gate and left it on top of the final gate for good luck – stories that have nothing to do with why we were there. I really wish I could say I learned a lot from the visit, but the truth is that I didn’t.

However, after that, our tour got a lot better. We went to a very remote area of the wall where you could climb to literally the top of the mountain and look down at the entire valley where you could see where the Mongols would be coming from if they attacked. The tour guide left us alone to climb the wall, and we climbed a very tough half mile to the top – I was out of breath by the time I got up there – and the view was pretty awesome, with mountains on one side, and the valley with about a ten mile stretch of the wall visible on the other side. The other place we went to was a canyon with an old town on top of it where the generals used to all live, and a long suspension bridge the went over the entire 300ft gorge. We were allowed to explore all over this place, which was another just beautiful setting with all these buildings to walk around and information on all their war machines and what they did (in English, thankfully). Again, the tour guide left us alone – probably the reason I enjoyed this part of it so much.

  

The view from the bottom.

  

The view from the top.

The generals town on the canyon.

  

The canyon at Jiayuguan.

  

The scary suspension bridge.

We went into the town for a little lunch, and then left for the town of Dunhuang, which was a four hour bus ride on which I slept the entire way. We said goodbye to our Jiayuguan tour guide, and got picked up at the bus station by another tour guide, who was a little less peppy and a little older, but still very tour-guide like in the way that everything felt so formal. We were taken to our hotel, and then left alone again to explore the town by ourselves.

Now China, which is about as wide as the US, is on 1 time zone. Which means that while the sun sets at a reasonable time in the east (7:30 or so), the western part of the country sees the sun set much much later, at around 9:30. Which means that supermarkets and eateries are all open way later than normal, some as late as 2am. When we got to the food market at 8:30pm, there was barely anyone there. To eat dinner. At 8:30pm. People didn’t start arriving until at least 9 or 9:30, and then it got really rowdy. There was an opera show, people were in full force buying stuff from the blocks and blocks of street markets, and those eateries was cooking away like madmen. By the time we got done with dinner and then bought some stuff from the market, is was close to midnight. And we have to start the tour of Dunhuang tomorrow morning at 7:30am.

  

The main market street at Dunhuang - still light out at 9pm.

  

The night shopping kinda reels you in. We ended up buying quite a bit of stuff.

We found out from the tour guide that we’re going to explore the sand dunes tomorrow, and probably ride camels and go sand-sledding. And we’re also going to the Thousand Buddha Caves, which I’m pretty excited about too. Now if only the tour guide can leave us alone…

Lanzhou, as I can now summarize, it’s actually one hell of a cool city. I had a great time today going to the various sights, traveling on the Yellow River and eating the delicious mutton that they have here. We started off the day having breakfast at the cafeteria at the university, which was probably the cheapest breakfast I’ve ever had. You can order any 1 item for about 0.5RMB ($0.07), including fried pastries, pancakes, hard-boiled eggs soaked in tea, congee, pork buns – which all taste amazing. You can get full off about 6 items, for a whopping total of 3RMB ($0.42). Even if you make minimum wage in America, that’s the equivalent of about 4 minutes of work. For an entire meal. In an hour of minimum-wage work, you can get breakfast for 2 weeks. It’s amazing.

Afterwards, we took a little tour around campus, which is quite like any campus you’ll see in America, with a few major exceptions. First, while the main attraction is basketball, the second recreational sport of choice is ping-pong, which is played outside by dozens and dozens of players at a time. And they are all frighteningly good – which almost makes up for how atrociously bad the basketball players are. The second is that all the dorms are separated between male and female dorms, of which either sex is forbidden from entering the other’s dorms. Which is so completely 19th century I can’t even begin to understand why this is the case in a freaking university. And the dorms are so behind the times as well – there are 8 bunks to a room, a common washroom which consists of a communal sink and horribly smelling bathrooms. You get around 10 sq. ft of personal space, which is enough to cough or sneeze but not to yawn and stretch your arms. There’s no laundry and you have to wash your clothes by hand. It’s a terrible way to live and I don’t think I can last a week in those conditions. Makes me appreciate my bathroom at home that much more.

Really terrible basketball players.

Much, much better ping pong players.

After making our way into town, we went to West Lake Park, a beautiful park in the middle of the city with a charming little lake and tea shops under the shade. It was Sunday and everyone was out, playing with their kids, walking the dog, or playing a round of mahjong with a pot of tea. Not a bad life at all. Then, we made our way to the bank of the Yellow River again, and found a place that offered a ride across the river on a raft made of wood and sheepskin blown up like balloons. Another crazy cultural invention that I can’t even begin to figure out how they came up with. Naturally, we agreed to do it, and rode all the way across the river on this ridiculous looking raft. The pictures don’t even begin to do this experience justice. Five of us piled on top, wearing life-vests and sitting on these Arabian-style mats, being guided by our rower who had mastered the art of rowing and taking a group picture at the same time. The disgusting, smelly Yellow River water was about six inches underneath us – I mean, I can’t imagine what this looked like from an outside observer – perhaps victims of a capsized boat being pulled to shore by a rescue team. In retrospect, it was probably stupid and unnecessary, but it was quite a unique experience nonetheless.

Our sheepskin-balloon raft.

View from the middle of the river, with my shoe for reference.

What it looks like from on top of the raft.

Our trusty sheepskin-balloon raft captain. Aye aye.

The majestic waterwheels.

Also inside the park was an amphitheater where they were staging the Lanzhou auditions for the Chinese version of American Idol. Which was enlightening to say the least, on how much China wants to be like America. Apart from the part where this was filmed in front of a live audience (who were really coming and going at their leisure), it’s was pretty much an early-season episode of American Idol, except with a less funny set of judges and way worse talent. All the contestants were female, and sang a karaoke-inspired version of an awful pop song, and got panned by the unfunny judges, who also attempted to give judgement on their fashion, but which had nothing to do with their performance altogether. One was an opera singer who just couldn’t hit any high notes. People applauded sometimes, I think out of pity.

The view of Central Mountain bridge.

The view is pretty amazing.

The white pagoda at the top of the mountain.

Tell me this doesn't look a little bit like Hong Kong.

A little intimidating.

It's quite stunning in the Lanzhou skyline.

Today was my first day out of the traditional tourist cities of Beijing and Shanghai, and I’m almost positive I’m not going to see any foreigners for at least a week. The plan is to eventually make our way to Northwestern China, where the culture and people are completely different from what you’d find in eastern China. The first stop is Lanzhou, and already I started feeling the culture shock. This came in two parts – the first came before even getting on the plane. People dressed in traditional Muslim headdress – the men with the cylindrical caps and women with the full headscarves – were all over our gate area, and it was just so bizarre to see Chinese people in Muslim clothing. Later I found out that Lanzhou is about 20% Hui, which is one of the many ethnic groups in China, and they are of Islamic ethnicity. As a result, almost all the restaurants here are Halal, which in Chinese, is translated as “clean and real”. The sign “clean and real” is seen everywhere, there are mosques all around the skyline, women are covering their entire head with a scarf, and you almost feel like you’re in a completely different country.

The second part hits you when you see the city for the first time. Lanzhou is located on the bank of the Yellow River, although you really wouldn’t know there was a river around if all you saw was the terrain on your way from the airport. There are big yellow plant-less rocky mountains all around, and at first, after getting off the plane, you feel like you just went flew from New York to New Mexico. Then, when you actually hit the city (which is a ridiculous 75km away from the airport), everything hits you in an instant – the river, the smog, the enormous buildings and the mounds and mounds of people. The buildings are higher and more plentiful than even Beijing, and everything’s being so crammed into such a little amount of space. But nothing feels like it’s 21st century – it feels more like a 1980s version of Hong Kong, where these huge signs, billboards and apartment buildings all look rusted and falling apart, tons of people are selling novelty items in the street and huge construction wastelands on every other block. It’s unlike anything I’d ever seen before.

  

Translation: Clean and real grilled meat.

  

One of the many mosques found in Lanzhou.

  

Still crowded. Yup, still in China.

  

Tall buildings and a construction site. The MO of Lanzhou, if you will.

Lanzhou is certainly not a city known for its attractions – in this guidebook I read about Lanzhou, under the list of “Things to do”, it simply said “Leave”. So, needless to say, I wasn’t expecting much, but I think that after today, Lanzhou is a cooler and more interesting city than people in guidebooks give it credit for. We stayed with my aunt, who is an English professor at the Lanzhou University of Technology, at her place close to the school, and took a taxi to her place from the bus stop, had a quick rest, and then headed for the city. We ate dinner at a “clean and real” restaurant (whose signs are all in green, the color of Islam), and took a tour through the city streets at night, which to put it lightly, is busy.

First we walked through another lane of street food vendors, this time much much different than what you’d find in Beijing. The cooks are mostly Hui, which means they are traditionally Islam and much less likely to be shouting at you or trying to coerce you into buying their food. They cook their food peacefully and attempt to entice you only when you’ve shown interest. Also, I get the feeling that everyone in Lanzhou eats here because there are literally over 100 food stalls, that when you are walking through it, feels like the Twilight Zone because it’s never-ending and keeps on repeating. There’s the usual barbecued meat fare (mutton is the main meat here, certainly no pork), and fried buns and pastries, but there were two items that I believe are specialties to the region. The first is Lanzhou La Mian (literally pulled noodles, you’ll recognize it more as the Japanese word Ramen), which is traditionally served in a beef broth with beef. Interesting, the food is such a local favorite that the government has decreed it illegal to sell a bowl of it for more than 3.50RMB ($0.50). The second, and less appealing specialty, is sheep head, which is boiled whole and served whole in front of you. There’s something quite unsettling about choosing a dead animal’s head to eat, but apparently a lot of good meat is in the head, especially the sheep brain, which is considered quite a delicacy. There seems to be a lot of local flavor, though, in the food of Lanzhou, and it’s very distinctly different that what I found in the big cities.

Another bustling food market.

A traditional Hui chef, just doing his thing.

  

Sheep head, staring right back at you.

  

Lots and lots of noodle stands like this where you pick your own toppings.

Afterwards, we took a stroll along the Yellow River, which was beautiful at night. It’s quite amazing how the nighttime brings out a different face to the city, and for Lanzhou, all the dirt and grime disappears into the darkness and all you get to see is the natural beauty of a city by the river. There’s a pedestrian bridge that’s completely lit up, and full of street vendors and people enjoying an evening walk along the river. In fact, the entire riverside district, besides the stink, is a very beautiful and cool part of the city. There’s definitely a charm here that I didn’t expect, and I’m sure I’ll get to see a lot of that tomorrow when I take a more extensive tour of the city. There are a few spots that we passed that I definitely want to go see, a mountain that overlooks the city, a large park, and I definitely need to have some of that Lanzhou La Mian.

    

The Yellow River at night.

My cousin and her love of taking pictures.

Alright, I can go through everything I did today, but really all I want to talk about is the street food. Because it’s awesome.

A quick rundown: the street we walked down I’ve actually been to before, and there are tons of cool arts and crafts stores, full of mostly some of the same stuff, but also some cool items that would probably make great gifts (I’ll probably be back to get stuff to bring back). There was a Tibetan store where we talked to the Tibetan store owner for a while, who was the nicest person and told us all about her high-elevation homeland and all the sheep that her family owns. There are also a ton of bars and coffee shops along the street, mostly for foreigners (like me, I would probably be considered a foreigner due to my interests) but they are very artsy, and had patios on the second floor and tons of greenery and aesthetically pleasing. If you go to Beijing, this is definitely the place I would recommend above anywhere else.

The street is called Luoguxiang Street. Don't forget it.

People exercising in front of a bar.

The interiors are really really cool...

One of the many arts & crafts shops.

If you want to see Beijing trying to push itself into the 21st century, go to Wangfujing Road, a pedestrian-only promenade with HUGE shopping malls and designer American brand names, expensive stores everywhere and a Catholic church! But, it was on this road that we encountered TWO street food eating markets, both of ridiculous variety and exquisite smells. (I’ll explain what exquisite means later) Meanwhile, we weren’t hungry yet so we went to the Imperial Palace but when we got there it was closed, so we walked around this beautiful park a little bit, and then came back to the food market. There was unfinished business to attend to!

My fervor of Catholicism can't be more accurately described.

Huge billboards...remind you of anywhere?

The first of two food markets, a little before sunset.

Everything you can find, on a stick.

The second of two huge markets.

I'll be back for you later.

So, by nighttime, we were back to the food market, and things were getting busy. Like I said, before, this place was awesome. A little overpriced, considering it was a tourist spot, but definitely dirt-cheap if compared to American prices, the variety at this place is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. You can sit down and order off a menu, where waiters will bring stuff from the food stalls for you and you can sit and avoid the crowd, or you can really just get in there and experience the chaos for yourself. The atmosphere is like a bazaar, where everyone’s screaming out what they have on a stick and you’re just trying to find the prices and figure out if what your getting is still alive or not. It’s absolute mayhem – and the place is so crowded you have to continuously trying to avoid bumping into someone else’s food. The variety is amazing as well, we must have ended up ordering about 15 different items – including lamb skewers, fish meatballs, fried rice, steamed pork buns, sesame sauce noodles, chicken shwarma in a bun, grilled corn, deep-fried dough, veggie-filled crepe, and of course, the scorpion. There were a LOT of other bugs available, but to be honest, I think I only had the stomach to try one. And I tried the one that was the most daring (in my opinion) because a) they were still alive and b) they are poisonous. Their tails were still squirming around when they’re on the skewers – I mean, I’m sure they were slowly dying a painful death, but they still looked like they were about to sting someone. They take the live scorpions, season it while it’s still alive (which can’t be a good feeling for them), and then stick it in the deep-fryer for about 5 minutes (yup, 5 minutes – presumably to cook out all the venom).

The crowded food bazaar at night.

Live scorpions on a stick. On the left side, grasshoppers and cicadas.

Fully cooked scorpion. Mmmm.

Onto the taste. I’ll be honest, I didn’t take my time and savor the scorpion. I pretty much just put the entire thing in my mouth and started chewing. All I could taste, at first, was the spices they put on it – which were very good, and the crunchiness of it made it almost feel like you were eating an extremely weirdly textured potato chip. And then after a few bites, the thing gets chewy, and you start beginning to taste the actual bug-iness of the scorpion. Which isn’t as bad as it may sound, because the thing lives in the ground, and it tasted like it. It was nutty, earthy, and frankly, not as bad as I had thought. Of course, both my dad and my cousin were taking pictures throughout this whole thing, but it really wasn’t that big of a deal. I got my dad to try it too, and he enjoyed it as well. But, we didn’t finish the rest of them. One was enough for today.

Ready to ingest deep-fried scorpion.

Mid-bite.

Yum.

Later, we took a little tour around Tian’anmen at night, where it’s all lit up and looks awesomely revolutionary. Mao’s mugshot looks especially sharp at night. Then we walked over to the Beijing Opera House, which is this egg-shaped structure that’s surrounded on all four side (ALL four sides) by water. There’s no bridge – the only way to get inside is to go underneath the moat. I suppose they don’t want anyone invading the opera house by land. If they bring their navy then they’d have earned their way in.

Tian'anmen by night.

He is STILL up there.

A little dark, but you can see the water surrounding the dome. There's no way to get across the water.

Alright, tomorrow I’m off to Lanzhou, which is one of the ten most polluted cities in the world, and where my aunt lives and works. Then, unfortunately, my updating may get spotty because I’m not quite sure where I’ll be able to find internet in the middle of the Gobi desert. Maybe I’ll just try to find a Starbucks and use their free wi-fi. Yeah, I can count on that happening.

The many walls of China. There's a lot of stuff to protect, apparently.

The great wall at Badaling.

The section of the wall I went to today was at Badaling, about 90 minutes northwest of Beijing. It’s part of one of the walls built by the Ming dynasty, which are the ones most on display because they well the most recently built, in the 1300s, and therefore the most impressive. A lot of the early walls were actually made of earthen mud, and went as high as maybe ten feet, but these were 26ft high on steep mountainous terrain, and wound neatly and impressively up the mountainside. You can’t help but gawk at how beautiful and awesome it is.

Today was perfect hiking weather – it had been closer to 95 degrees all week, which would have been hell, but it was probably around 65 degrees with a cool breeze, and pre-rain fog, which made the strenuous hike not just bearable, but very enjoyable. From the entrance point to the wall, there were two directions you could go – north or south. This is what I saw on the north side:

Comparable perhaps to the Shanghai subway.

What the hell is that sign doing there? Is that what all those people are going to go see?

It looked like 80% of the people went in that direction, and 20% to the south. It’s not the Hollywood sign, folks, it has no cultural significance whatsoever. It’s ugly and ruins a perfectly good landscape. So anyways, naturally, I went south. The hike was very strenuous though, and the few people who did go south would turn back very soon and the further you got, the fewer people you saw. Eventually, we stood alone at the furthest tower you could go for about fifteen minutes before anyone else came. If there’s one theme about my trip it’s that the fewer the people, the better. I like a challenge that way – it’s probably the equivalent of trying to find a crowd (of people, not polar bears) in northern Canada.

Hiking up is a slow and strenuous endeavor.

You literally cannot sometimes even see your next step going down.

The end of the road.

On the way up, we met an American ex-pat who lives in Beijing and conversed with him concurrently in Chinese and English on most of the way back down. He’s been here for 27 years, studying and teaching Chinese history, and his Chinese is flawless. I don’t know if you’d know how weird it looks to see a Caucasian man speaking perfect Chinese, but I’m sure it’s the equivalent of a Chinese man wearing a yarmulke and reciting passages from the Torah (which ironically I’ve been known to do). You’re first shocked, but then delighted that he’s gone so against the grain to learn such a complex language so well. Anyways, the locals who sell stuff in China, who LOVE to target foreigners with broken English spiels about how “good quality” their little metal plaques are, or how they “give good price for you” but instead are ripping you off, get quite a surprise when they approach this guy with that stuff and he’ll retort in perfect Chinese, “Wow, how beautiful! Too bad I already have one.” And they laugh and back off, not knowing what to do. I was talking with him in Chinese about life in Beijing, and we were getting looks from everyone who passed – Chinese, foreigners alike. He didn’t seem to mind much – I think he likes all the attention, and I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten that much of a kick from seeing everyone’s reactions.

Before heading back, we stepped into the Great Wall museum, which was free and really big and informative. And all the text was translated into English, which was more of a relief than anything. You can love the culture and all, but really, you just have to go back to what’s familiar sometimes. In the last exhibit was a photo of every single world leader’s who’s visited the Great Wall at Badaling since the 1950s. You saw familiar faces such as Richard Nixon, Fidel Castro, Ronald Reagan, and about 70 other world leaders, and then there was a quote board of what everyone had said about the great wall, mostly compliments about China and remarks about how awesome the Great Wall is. And my first thought was, is this really necessary? Using a historical monument to bridge international friendships after such colossal alienation seems insincere at best. But then I think I realized that historical significance was probably the only thing that China had going for it at the time. What better way to forget about Maoist China than to focus on something magnificent that was built 500 years ago?

It started raining after we left, and of course, we saw a camel in the parking lot.

To be honest, I still don’t know what the Great Wall actually means. It was an impressive display of ingenuity in engineering, and it was a unifying event for sure, but I think it still feels like a little bit of an overkill. I think that paranoia’s a little bit ingrained into the Chinese culture at large, the present swine flu crisis included. Could they have just fortified their cities? Or just the imperial palaces? Did they have to build thousands of miles of walls across impenetrable terrain? Or was it simply a flexing of their manpower? I’m wondering – if it were possible to build a wall to keep out the swine flu, they’d probably expend the manpower to do that too. The Great Swine Flu Wall of China. Patent, anyone?

One of the wider hutongs, notice the shops on both sides.

A busy hutong where cars can't even pass.

One of the many storefronts that line the alleyways.

I looked up a walking tour of Beijing from the Frommer’s Guide (walking tour #4 if you’re interested), one of the less-traveled ones, and I found myself in all sorts of interesting places far far away from the hordes of tourists. First, we stopped by some minor attractions found in some of these hutongs, ones not built for foreign tourists because none of the signs were in English. (This was actually problematic, my Chinese reading skills aren’t very good and I got a headache trying to read all that Chinese…) There was the Lu Xun house, a major writer from the post-dynastic days who is a national icon (makes sense, I’ve never heard of him before). Then we went to a Buddhist temple named Bai Ta Si, literally White Tower Temple, with a huge white tower as the centerpiece behind it. After that, the imperial temple, which by this time my head was so spinning from all the Chinese that I still have no idea what that place was all about.

The courtyard of the Lu Xun house, found in - you guessed it - a hutong.

The white tower temple, with the white tower behind it.

Closer on the tower, that was designed by a Nepalese artist in 1271.

The imperial temple, with uses very unbeknownst to me. My dad nicely silhouetted in right corner.

This was the Chinese history part of the tour, and I got a nice education from my dad in the dynastic rule of China, and the post-dynastic period of revolution before the Communist party took over. I can now name my Chinese dynasties in chronological order after the year 1116 – Jin, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing. Boo-yah. We moved VERY slowly through these places, and it was well after 3pm when we left – I’m pretty sure we got there at around 10:30am. My dad does this thing where he explains everything to me, whether I already know it or not, which made this tour excruciating long. I told him to just give me the Cliff Notes, but this statement confused him, so I just listened to his whole spiel. There was another historical place on this tour, but I skipped it for the obvious reasons.

After that we started our extensive walk throughout the hutongs in this area of town. Many hutongs in the city have actually been torn down and a lot of residents forced out during the recent renovations for the Olympics, but in this area many still lay intact (although don’t know how long that will actually last). I went into a few of the residences, which consist of a smaller alley and a little yard with small apartments on all sides. The living seems relaxed and easy – a sharp contrast to the actual city life outside. The neighborhood stores seem to be only frequented by locals, and everyone seems to know each other in their own hutong. Store owners will sit outside, saying hello to neighbors as they walk by, and people will be playing chess in the street. It’s probably the type of communal living that Mao had imagined, and while the whole place looks very run-down and behind the times, I do believe that the people are happy living there.

The entrance to residences from the hutongs.

  

An apartment - decrepit looking but highly functional, I'm guessing.

  

The common yard. Literally a square yard.

I’m sure everyone has a perceived sense of superiority when they see something like this, but I have to point something out about the state of the economy in China. This is something I learned last night during dinner while talking with some local friends – there is a mountain of discrepancy between the rich and the poor in China. I mean, mind-blowing discrepancy. There are people who work for the government who have hundreds of millions of RMB (at least $10 mil) who are skimming money, and then there are those who earn 2000RMB ($300) a month working labor jobs. And the reason is that there are no books in China, no official bookkeeping of expenses and income since all the transactions are done in cash. There’s no system of credit, because frankly, the Chinese don’t believe in it, and there’s no back-checking of transactions because even getting your “paycheck”, buying houses or cars are all done in cash. Apparently, they just hand you an envelope at the end of the month with your salary in it. Done deal. And the leaders of the companies are reporting erroneous expenses, or just pocketing money and not giving raises – I mean there’s just no way to check anything. The worst is the government, because they have no governmental obligation to put money into anything, so whatever taxes they get they’ll put some of it into construction and pocket the rest (I say pocket loosely, they’d probably need a warehouse to fit all the money they steal). Meanwhile the people who are getting the raw end of the deal, the people who need that money the most, are the people who work labor and are getting their 2000RMB a month and are barely getting by. If you thought America’s shrinking middle class was bad…

But like I said before, life is bustling within these hutongs. Schools are built along them, there are markets aplenty, people are selling stuff on the streets – I mean, there’s plenty going on. But it just feels so isolated from what’s going on outside on the major streets – designer clothing, souvenir shops and tourist attractions. It’s a slice of life in the truest sense of that phrase.

Children in the hutong.

An elementary school in the hutong.

A kindergarten. Notice how these actually look really nice...

There's no shortage of stuff to buy here.

An old man was selling cicadas on the street.

An interesting note about the guy who was selling cicadas – as I was saying earlier about that perceived sense of superiority, well this guy took me down a peg. Upon seeing these cicadas I knew I had to get a picture, so I swooped in and took one. The guy (he’s old and missing teeth) looks at me and says, “do you know what manners are?” apparently insulted by the fact that I had not asked his permission to take a photo. I was taken aback – Chinese city folk are not known for their manners, as I described by people pushing and shoving their way through the subway. Yet here was this guy reprimanding me, someone who went to an English boarding school and got lectured on manners, about not asking him permission to take a photo? I had to recover and apologize, of course, but I should have known better, and not just about asking permission, but making assumptions about these people who are clearly a different breed than the city folk who take the subway in Shanghai.

The rest of the day, I took a break from all this cultural exploration and retired to a familiar setting – Starbucks. We walked over to the notoriously westernized Houhai district, with bars blasting rap music, Visa Accepted Everywhere signs, and Budweiser ads everywhere. The area is right next to a beautiful lake, and is clearly aimed at foreigners with their ridiculously high prices, people who would obviously feel uncomfortable unwinding anywhere else. But I was falling asleep – I needed my café latte, my sustenance. Come on, you don’t live in LA for six years and then go a week without getting an espresso beverage and not have some kind of craving.

A setting this beautiful deserves...

...the King of Beers, of course.

The long awaited Great Wall trip is tomorrow, and we’re starting off early. And I haven’t forgotten about the scorpion tasting either, that’s happening on Friday. And then on Saturday, we’re off to Northwestern China.

It's peaceful and quiet - quite unlike a factory district.

Chinese graffiti.

One of the many galleries.

Making use of smoke stack chimneys.

It’s still quite obvious art is still more of a foreigner’s thing anyway, because there’s still an overabundance of overpriced cafés selling grilled veggie sandwiches and tuna salads, with all-English menus. But to be honest, about 90% of the people I saw there today were Chinese people, mostly students who went by themselves, others, photographers with their large SLR cameras, and of course the typical tourists who would spend about thirty seconds in each gallery because all the paintings looked the same.

Anyways, there’s not many pictures of the galleries themselves, because there were the people there who watched us like hawks, enforcing the no photos rule. However, I did manage to sneak a few in, including this one, for ironic effect:

Strictly enforced...

As I had said earlier, Chinese art tends to be more reactionary because of everything these people went through during thirty years of communism and revolutionary art. It’s approaching, from a creative standpoint, the sophistication of a lot of American modern art – they’re finding uses for abstraction and mixed media, and it’s something very akin to what you’d see at a MOCA/MOMA. I’m sure that I’m not really understanding a lot of it because I haven’t really lived in China and a lot of these social issues are going over my head. But what I am familiar with is the revolution, since both of my parents lived through it and talk about regularly, and the anti-revolutionary art here is extremely on the nose and effective.

The Chairman does the dirty work himself.

Why do you look so nervous, Chairman?

Chinese pissing on Marcel Duchamp's R. Mutt urinal.

But like I said, most of the stuff really went over my head. And I was an art minor, and studied all about western art theories, but I think the lack of knowledge about the culture and knowing what people went through really hinders my understanding of the pieces. With that said, it’s all a very educational experience – I think I learnt more about Chinese culture here than I can at Tiananmen Square, or the Forbidden City or any of the historical sites, because those sites aren’t really too significant for the people of today. What actually happened to these people they won’t show on any tour. I mean, the people here were first brainwashed by Mao and then brought into the 21st century within 30 years of his death. How do you show a tour of that? My dad, for example, remembers with fervor the exact words to every single revolutionary song that they taught him during school. He remembers saying a prayer to Mao three times a day. And now he’s building airplane engines in Connecticut. The journey is immeasurable. And there’s no way anyone can just find this out while visiting China without talking extensively to locals – and even then, most people keep that stuff pretty guarded too. And the government still keeps a tight grip on published literature so it’s not like everyone’s writing about it either. I think that art – being a sub-conscious medium of expression – actually gets those feelings out so people can see it. There’s a deep bruise on these people that I don’t think many people in America can relate to, and finally there are places like this where it can actually be on display.

Anyways, I pretty much spent the entire day there looking through the dozens of galleries and incredibly contrasting decor. We sat in one of those coffee shops, I had a coffee and a grilled veggie sandwich, and did some reading. Tomorrow I’ll be doing a walking tour through some of Beijing’s back alleys, and the next day I’ll be going to the great wall. We’ll see how long I can avoid Tiananmen Square before I run out of things to do until Friday.

I’m channeling one of my idols Andrew Zimmern here, host of Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods, who’s pretty much eaten anything and everything that’s edible on this planet. I spent my entire childhood as a picky eater, and almost every relative I have still sort of see me as one, but I think that during the last two years, watching that show has made me infinitely more curious about international cuisine and allowed me to shed away the apprehensions behind trying something new. I think that during this trip, I am finally ready to put that mettle to the test.

I’ve been to China about four times since I had originally left, and I don’t think I’ve ever tried anything new while I was here. If you’ve ever been to China, you’d know how crazy this sounds – almost EVERYTHING is something new, and whatever you think about Chinese food in America, or Canada or wherever, it’s just a ridiculously small percentage of what’s actually out there. And trust me, it’s all pretty out there.

Just as with any country’s cuisine, there are large amounts of indigenous plants, animals, and fruits that you just can’t find in any other place on earth. During the morning, my aunt went out to get some fruits from the local market, and I told her to get some stuff I probably hadn’t tasted before. Well, she listened. This stuff I had to look up online because I hadn’t even heard of it before.

The Chinese bayberry.

On top, the loquat. Underneath, the mangosteen.

The inside of a mangosteen. It looks like garlic, but is sweet and soft.

The bayberries and loquat exist only in China. Fresh mangosteen is pretty much a banned export item in the US, and exist only in southern Asia. The bayberries look kinda like raspberries except they are just sour as hell. I tried a few of them, and my aunt told me the darker ones would be sweeter but they still made my mouth cringe. The loquat is absolutely disgusting – sour, bitter, not sweet at all and kinda of a harder consistency than you’d expect, more like an unripe mango – I believe the fruit is used for medicinal purposes as well. The mangosteen was really sweet, and the taste wasn’t so bad, but my god, the texture is weird. It’s like when you have an orange, except you just suck out the juice, and all you’re left with is that stringy, pulpy substance inside, except that it’s not chewable enough to actually swallow. You don’t eat it as much as you suck as much juice out of it as possible and then spit it out. I’d actually eat it if it wasn’t for the mess you created with it afterwards.

OK, more about weird fruits later. Today was only a half day of touring around, since I’m actually writing this on a plane to Beijing, that left in the early evening. We went to a place called Qi Bao, which is the equivalent of Old Town Shanghai. It was here before Shanghai was even built, and is located around this river, with little alleyways and riverwalks all over this quaint little place. I’ve been here twice before, and it’s actually really know for the alley of street food, where everything’s made really fresh, and most of the time you have no idea what you’re eating. Well, whenever I had come here before, I just got whatever I was familiar with, which was always the barbecued meats, or the sticky rice. And believe me, the barbecue and the sticky rice is a huge part of what’s eaten here. But never did I try the stuff that I had today. In true Bizarre Foods style, I photographed everything and ate most of it too.

Qi Bao, built around this creek.

One of the many alleyways.

I’m going to split this up into the good, the bad and the ugly. And just you wait – it got pretty ugly. First, the good:

Stick rice buns with mustard plant leaves and a pork filling.

Sticky rice with red bean paste inside.

These were actually really good and tasted exactly what they look like. Sticky rice (which is a theme in Chinese street food) is used in both items, the first one savory with a meat filling, the second sweet. They went down pretty well, and were the first things I had today. A good way to start off, one may think.

  

Fried tofu skins.

The description may sound weird, but these were also extremely delicious. The outside looks like plastic, but it’s crispy and when you get to the inside, all the oil and tofu flavor hits your mouth at once. The inside tastes eggy, kinda like scrambled eggs really, with a little bit of a buttery texture to it. I think this was the best surprise of the day.

Fresh roasted pork shoulder, and in bottom right, wrapped in leaves.

The pork unwrapped.

The meat is seasoned amazingly. I was shocked at how much fat and skin was still attached to the meat, and apparently the locals will eat all of it, but pork is lean enough to separate the two easily, and it’s cooked with a great consistency. Not quite pulled pork style, but soft enough to just melt in your mouth. The leaves are inedible and add that leafy taste to it – I don’t know how else to explain it, but if you’ve ever had anything wrapped in a leaf you’ll know what I mean.

Dough-y balls with filling inside.

They look the same, but they're actually six different flavors.

There’s a trained guy standing by the huge pot of these dough balls, where all six flavors are mixed in together, and he’ll somehow find your filling for you despite them looking exactly the same. There has to be an art to it, I must have stood there for five minutes trying to tell the difference between them but I mean, they look EXACTLY the same. Anyways, I’ve had these before, and the two on the left had meat fillings, and although the meat & bok choy combination made both myself and my aunt spit it out in disgust, the sweet ones were the saving grace. There were black sesame, whole dates, date paste, and peanut butter. The black sesame and peanut butter are exquisite – the dough is so soft and neutral, and the sesame and peanut butter so sweet and pasty, it’s the perfect balance. Just, whatever you do, don’t ever get the meat & vegetable one.

Pancake wafers, made fresh.

The last of the good. I couldn’t stop eating these – you can’t tell what they actually look like fully made, but they are like rolled up pancakes with the crispiness of a wafer, and they taste like an ice cream cone but freshly made and slightly more buttery. I ate these on the entire walk back.

Now, onto the bad. I’m actually going to label this the bad/weird section, because there were foods that were so strange that I couldn’t actually make a decision on whether it was good or bad. Even after the shock wore off, I still have no idea whether or not I had liked it, all I know is that I would probably try it again if I had the chance. Onto the food…

BBQ quail.

After I ordered this, they went and deep fried it for me, which is why I believe quail goes in the bad/weird instead of the good section. I could barely bite into this because the skin becomes so hard after the deep frying that you have to find a place to bite and the thing is so small, and you don’t want to bite into too many body parts at once. I nibbled at the leg, then lifted up its thigh to bite into the breast section. (TWSS) It tasted like chicken, of course, fairly lean, but way tougher and harder to chew. Not sure if this was because of the barbecued meat but it’s just so small to have any part of it be moist. And having that head stare at you when you’re eating it is quite unsettling as well.

More sticky rice wrapped in leaves.

I ordered the savory sticky rice again, this time wrapped in leaves, choosing a filling made of egg yolk and meat. Sounds alright, until you start tasting what all those elements actually taste like together. The rice is sticky, the yolk is hard, and the meat is greasy and soft. And the worst part is that this was cold when I got them, and had to have them heat it up in the back, which probably meant they stuck it in a microwave for a minute, and it came out way too hot. I’m sure these could taste better, but man, did this one suck.

Deep-frying fermented stinky tofu. Now I condone the use of the mask.

Stinky tofu with hoisin sauce and hot sauce.

Stinky tofu, notoriously, is one of Andrew Zimmern’s Achille’s heels. (His other Achille’s heel comes later…) In the Taiwan episode, he could barely get it down, and couldn’t even take a second bite. I’m sure the stuff he had in Taiwan was stinkier and more fermented than what I had, but I was determined to be able to take a second bite. Stinky tofu, if you don’t know, is tofu that ferments in a salty, milky brine for sometimes months, and then deep fried and eaten with sweet and spicy sauces. Why or how they came up with this, I can’t even imagine. But it’s a delicacy. It’s like if you left some hamburger meat in the bottom back corner of your fridge and had a leaky milk carton right above it, and left it there for six months and then found it one day, and instead of throwing it out, you decide the best thing to do with it is to deep-fry it and eat it. I mean, someone had to have fucked up royally for this to happen, right? This stuff smells disgusting – you can smell it from blocks away, and at the first whiff you’re ready to gag.

Anyways, my aunt loves the stuff, so she gets a full order and I tried it. I’ve had deep fried tofu before, and I quite enjoy it, but this texture was really weird. It tasted almost gelatinous, and although the sweet and spicy sauces masked the taste of it a little, the foul smell made it almost unbearable to eat. I finished an entire square, though, and if it wasn’t for the sauces, I doubt I could have kept it down. I really don’t understand the difference between this dish and if the tofu had just been fried and not rotted for a month. What’s wrong with eating stuff fresh?

The jackfruit, and what the insides look like.

Jackfruit portions.

Jackfruit is another one of those fruits you can only find in this part of the world. Plainly put, this is a bizarre fruit. The Chinese word for it literally means “honey pineapple”, and it’s not far off. The texture, though, is like that of an over-ripened banana, but it’s really really sweet and kinda melts in your mouth. It’s all good, though, until the aftertaste hits, and you feel like you just ate something that’s been rotting on the ground for a month. There’s no other way to describe it, but it’s just so soft and mushy that after you’ve eaten a few of these, it starts tasting absolutely disgusting because of the aftertaste. Just have one piece and wash it down with some milk tea, and you’ll be fine.

Now, I’ll preface this next one by saying I didn’t quite believe it when I first heard about it either. It’s called beggar’s chicken, and has quite a story to go with it. Apparently, there some beggars in Qi Bao who had a fresh chicken, but no way to cook it. So they wrapped it up, feathers and all, in slush mud, and then baked it in a fire. (How the hell do you come up with this? Did someone drop the bird in mud, and was like, Eureka!? I’m not making this stuff up, I swear.) Then they unwrapped it and found that the feathers all fell off, and the chicken smelled really nice. Then, they ate the chicken and quickly patented their cooking breakthrough and made millions off the publishing rights. (….although, not quite…) This is a series of pictures chronicling what it look like when we bought it to what it looked like unwrapped:

I don't think you can blame me when I had a hard time believing this was chicken.

Slowly peeling the many layers of mud off of the chicken.

And then, when you unwrap the lotus leaf, you get...

...the chicken. In all it's glory.

The thing literally looked like burnt firewood when we bought it. I think this dish was just weird more than it was bad-tasting. I mean, chicken tastes like chicken, it didn’t taste like anything special. I don’t think I could appreciate the fact that it had been baked in a mud casing because it’s so wrapped up in that lotus leaf that there’s no real earthy flavor to it at all, like one may expect. I mean, it’s just chicken – it’s no wonder, right?, that this method of cooking hasn’t really caught on like wildfire. Can you imagine people drumming up mud just so they can cook a freaking chicken? It’s ridiculous.

Alright, now onto the ugly. To be honest, this section can be summarized with one word. Durian. Andrew Zimmern’s other Achille’s heel.

Curiosity got the best of me.

This is what durian looks like on the inside. What you're missing is the fact that it smells like all of your friends just puked on it.

I have to admit, curiosity got the best of me when I saw this in the supermarket. I’d only heard about this, the “King of Fruits”, and you don’t often get a chance like this to try a delicacy like this for 14RMB ($2) a pound. I’d heard all about how bad it smells, but even having the knowledge that it’s the most foul smelling fruit on the planet doesn’t prepare you for how badly it gets you when you sniff it for the first time. It’s like if a dozen skunks all sprayed their stink into a lavatory and then the sewage system started backing up and the door is sealed shut. I mean, you probably think I’m exaggerating, and I probably am, but not by much.

But like they all say, it’s all about the taste, and it’s supposed to be this sweet-tasting delicacy that you’ll love on your first bite. Well, that’s a crock of shit. It tastes marginally better than how it smells. I’ll agree with Andrew Zimmern’s analysis on this one – it tastes like completely rotten, mushy onions. We made everyone in the family try it, including my 84 year old grandfather who’s mostly lost his sense of smell, but not taste. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed quite as hard as I did when I saw his reaction to it – just complete and utter disgust compounded by a burning desire to curb his flaring gag reflexes. Nobody liked the taste. How can anyone like the taste? How can anyone enjoy stuffing rotting garbage into their mouths? This question is a struggle I will probably deal with for the rest of my life.

There were a few things that I saw but I didn’t try. As many of you know, I don’t eat seafood – I can’t deal with the taste, and so I didn’t eat anything that came from the sea. Also, I’ve had innards before and generally they make me gag, so I stayed away from animal organs as well.

Duck legs wrapped with duck intestines and duck heart. A little like bacon-wrapped scallops? No?

Seafood or innards, I couldn't tell which, but it was one of them.

On the left, the aforementioned quail. On the right, I believe that's duck throat. Could be wrong, though.

The other part of this food extravaganza is seeing what the supermarket is like. There’s like tens of thousands of different items available, maybe ten times the size of Ralphs, with fresh food everywhere. It’s the variety of a Ralphs with the freshness of a Farmer’s Market, and always packed with people. Here are a few highlights:

Fresh poultry for everyone to just grab. No silly butcher counters here.

Chinese people love their rice.

Fish heads. Fresh off the guillotine.

Like the rest of China, packed with people.

So that does it for my food adventures in Shanghai. Now, onto Beijing, with the notorious street food on a stick. I told my dad I wanted to try a freshly grilled insect. Maybe a grasshopper, or a scorpion. He said he’d try it with me. We’ll see if we actually follow through.