Wanderlust pt.1: Beijing Walmart Experience

Tired of living off of McDonald's, fear and fried dough twists, Zach and I headed off to Walmart to pick up some dried fruit and nuts to keep our stomach's happy. If you are ever in China, check out Walmart. We saw live turtles for sale, dead stingrays, all sorts of packaged and dried fish and shrimp(normal in China), chicken feet and all sorts of oddities. I have to admit that Zach and I couldn't stomach watching people stick their bare hands into the piles of shrimp and chicken legs and toss the limbs and bodies about as if sifting through apples, but what disturbed us even more was the fact that live turtles were being kept for purchase (fair enough in a foreign country) but in inadequate conditions...The water was dirty, the tanks too small, and there were dead bodies of fish in the fish tanks themselves next to the LIVE fish. For Walmart to pull that off even though the company makes billions every year is disgusting.

But not all of Beijing Walmart was bad, in fact we managed to grab a hold of some imported dried fruit such as raisins, mangoes and cranberries-pretty much what we needed instead of carbs and sweets.

So here are a few photos of our experience to Walmart....and Zach with weird stuffed animals we found including a bunch of bananas and a pumpkin:

Oreo cookie flavours are different here ! We found fruit flavoured ones finally. More photos of china sweets for my family's enjoyment.

The chinse seem to be obsessed with snack sized everything including this mini pancake we found in a pile of treats and these mini waffles in the background:

They are OBSSESSED with oil here. Seriously, there was an entire row dedicated to different kinds:

We also managed to find the biggest thermos for who knows what....I wonder about the practicality....

The meat sections was really different from ours. Within seconds we found pigs feet, chicken's feet(a favourite apparently), liver, hearts and other goods from every type of meat. We also found people rummaging through the meat piles with bare hands collecting their goods. It was strange seeing butchers not wiping down their meat cutting sections and leaving blood all over chopping block surfaces in the middle of the store, not even behind the comfort of a counter.

The bloody, unclean chopping block right in the middle of Walmart was pretty gross....

Pigs ears....

The Chinese have big sweet tooths and show a huge love affair towards bread. We found tons of twists and bread rolls along with cheesecake like desserts and little goodies to grab and go.