In the West it’s a common known fact that in East Asian cultures are renowned for eating almost anything, literally anything, and even before this trip began I knew we would try lots of new foods and delicacies but I also knew there was a line I would not cross.
On our first evening in Beijing proper we ended up at a food court for dinner and on par with those with Singapore and KL (albeit with no English menu and you had to play a bit of a guessing game on the meat items!) which was delightful and it was in a location that was what we dubbed as Times Square for all its lights and billboards.
Now as we came out we noticed an archway like any archway leading towards a Chinatown any where in the world and we saw it was a busy street with market stalls so we thought we would wander down it.
At first the street was offering all sorts of tourist goodies from statues of Mao, to waving cats to Buddha necklaces but then it started to offer foods, at first it was what seemed like regular Chinese street food, but then the weird stuff started to appear. When I say weird stuff I mean like the weird shit they eat on Survivor or Fear Factor.
They had it all deep fried locusts, scorpions, tarantula’s, rats and even cockroaches I think, all I can say was that I was not eating any of these ‘delights’. Although all around Chinese Tourists and locals were lapping it up, some people had handfuls of kebabs sticks of these things, so wrong!!
If this was not bad enough we came to one stall and it had some mini scorpions on a skewer that looked like they had been steamed, but just as I was thinking that the owner hit the table and all of a sudden 100’s of little scorpions legs started moving in unison, not only were these little critters due to meet there maker by being deep fried, they also had to wait for the inevitable while skewered upside down with a bunch of there buddies, it was like some weird insect freak show!
The closest I got to these ‘delights’ was photographing them, so I leave you with a sample for your viewing pleasure!
