Our main object of the night was to check out the night snack market just off Wangfujing road.
To recap: we had only just got off the 24hr+ train ride from Shenzhen to Beijing, and had just walked past St Joseph’s Church.
The night snack market is primarily targeted at tourists, both domestic and international (well the whole district is targeted at tourists). It is a brightly-lit single row of stalls that stretches on for at least 500m. They don’t all sell different things though, you see alot of repeats. Particularly the disgusting variety of meats/insects/arachnids/reptiles/snails/etc.
Actually the food isn’t that good at all. It seems cheap enough however to get a full stomach one could spend quite a bit. Not that one would want to get a full stomach on that food, because it is SHITTY. And I’m not saying it’s bad because the “food” is too weird to eat, I mean even the normal stuff is rather ordinary. For example I bought a bowl of almond jelly but it was lukewarm…eew. The meat kebabs were tough, and they kept trying to sell us more (”just pay RMB5 more and we’ll throw in 2 more sticks!!”) So somehow in the foray the boys walked away with a handful of kebab things. One of which had about 10 chicken hearts speared onto the stick all in a line. To my amusement they were eating it wondering what it was, but generally agreeing it was satisfactory if a bit weird. Firstly because they are absolutely not the type of people who would eat these sorts of animal organs, and secondly…don’t you even know what chicken hearts look like??!!
One of the things Alice definitely wanted to try in China were candied haw fruit (bing tang hu lu), even though it wasn’t in season. The only stall that sold it was right at the start (prime location -> people normally buy food right away at the start = more expensive) and I guess the man guessed that Alice really wanted it. So he sold a stick to her for RMB20!!!!! It wasn’t particularly fresh and it was a fricking rip off. That guy cheated us T_T
It was yummy but I dislike eating these sorts of things outside…because the sugar syrup gets everywhere and then you have to walk around with sticky fingers…
Anyway after that we visited the actual shopping centres on Wangfujing and discovered the department stores were selling similar sticks of candied haw fruit (arguably fresher and undoubtedly moe HYGENIC) for around RMB5-10. =____________=
Oh and we were unsuccessful at withdrawing money from the stupid ATMS at the basement of one of the big shopping centres. ARGH.
Trackback/Pingback (1)
[...] shops in the shiny new buildings were chain stores that you could find in Hong Kong, and the nearby Donghuamen Night Snack Market and Wangfujing Night Market were fairly ordinary (more on them in later posts). It’s all a [...]