Beijing Food

 

The local bakery (and a lot for the most part) make these beautiful cakes. Most are in the shape of small animals like cats or lambs, but some are just plain log cakes topped with mini macarons (just like the Paris ones!).

 

Our favourite breakfast so far. This is a deep fried dough twist dusted in sugar. The texture is similar to a warm croissant and the sugar makes it taste like those street doughnuts you get at fairs but instead of being dipped in sugar upon purchase, they already come premade.

 

 

The first night we were in Beijing made me desperate to try dumplings, after all, China is famous for them. We ordered a mixture of veggie, pork and shrimp dumplings and I had a good sample of each since Zach is a vegetarian. The shrimp and pork dumplings were definitely my favourite while the glass noodle, bean and egg stuffed veggie dumplings didn't really appeal to either one of us. I think the coolest thing about eating dumplings was how interesting they were to eat using chopsticks. As someone who frequently eats fairly small bits of sushi, it was difficult at first to get a hang of holding onto these palm sized dumplings. Looking at the locals eat, we learned that they grab the tops with their chopsticks and either insert the entire dumpling into their mouth or bite their way through the delicious food.

 

Local street vendor market selling starfish, scorpions, centipede, lizard, snakes, seahorses and some other creep crawlies. What a weird sight seeing people chow down on these creatures. To say the least, we were pretty grossed out. Also, bottom right depicts large squid on sticks also for sale throughout the market-these seemed pretty popular and sucking on tentacles was common!

 

The worst thing about seeing this market was the animals still being alive when being served-and this goes for the merchandise as well. Whilst walking along the narrow street, we caught sight of a man selling small reptiles in coloured water bags in the shape of key chains. The reptiles appeared to either be baby salamanders or baby turtles, and all were encased in thick plastic bags the size of your palm in pink, orange and blue water. The bags lacked any escape holes or openings meaning the reptiles starved for the owner's entertainment as a key chain.

 

The second disturbing thing about the market was the live animals on skewers. Seeing as I am fairly blind without my glasses, it wasn't until Zach made me take a video of the scorpions on sticks that I saw them moving. The most interesting observation however was the fact that most looked like they were trying to sting themselves in the head to (we assumed) hurry death. Upon further research however, it has apparently been disproven that scorpions do this for that reason, although seeing what we witnessed sure leaves us thinking otherwise.