Mad Cooks on the move (3.9.2009)

Tonight at 21.15 our D321 train for Shanghai would depart from the Beijingzhan (railway station). Before that we tried to figure out what to do. Well, for starters I ate some nacho-type (made mainly from rice) snacks and frankfurters (small sausages) á la China, which I bought yesterday from a store, so that was a healthy start for the morning.

We decided to pay our respects to Buddha and headed off for the Lama Temple in the North-Eastern corner of the second ringroad. Incense odour filled the air as people were honouring the different buddhist symbols, such as the tallest (Guinness record) buddha in the world, 18 meters. There were also couple of exhibitions of the various buddha statues the temple had collected. It crossed my mind to also honour the symbols, but I think it would have been somehow inappropriate as I do not acknowledge buddhism (at least officially ;) ).

After the visit we had something to eat. We tried to order the famous hot pot, but as the restaurant staff did not speak any English, and the pricing was very puzzling, we decided to take something more basic. After this we headed for the main event of the day: eating disgusting things at the night market street.

The night market street is a kind of shopping streets with main interest in restaurants and eating in general. There is this row of stalls, which offer the craziest stuff that I have yet seen. For example, there was starfish, chicken's heart, goat's penis, crickets, organs etc. With Silja we decided to taste a few of these. As a starter we went to get some water for flushing down the insects. We always ate beside a trash can if we'd get sick. I must point out that no Chinese person did eat these "delicacies". So, first we took some fried silk-worm shells, which tasted a bit slimy but not too much. After this came some octopus tentacles, which were quite nice actually, and some chicken stomach. The latter was probably the most disgusting, because there was this image in my head that what if there was some food leftovers in the chicken's stomach, I would be eating also those. Also, the stomach was crunchy in an unpleasant way. The next one was probably the best (probably because it had so much salt in it and it was deep-fried in grease), namely the scorpion. There was two sorts of scorpion, of which we took the smaller ones. The bigger one was quite expensive and pretty terrifying sight. The final two sticks were filled with centipede ("tuhatjalkainen"), which was jolly comfortably crunchy from the outside, but had this green slime inside, which resembled somewhat of really rotten blue cheese. Water beetle was the last one of the bunch, and had that same kind of taste as the silk-worm shells, but more harder surface. One treat we would allow for ourselves: this stick filled with all kinds of fruits, which were inside this hardened sugar coating. Yumm!!

We got back to our hostel and met three guys, with whom I was talking last night up until 2:30 A.M. (two Germans and one U.S., Will was his name). We wished them good luck with the insects that they were also about to go eat. Pretty much after that we headed off for the Shanghai train.

After sweating like pigs we got onto our magnificent train. There was no shower in the train so I felt very sticky the whole way. But the cabin had these slippers, some water (cold and hot) for drinking, air-conditioning and as a bonus this friendly Chinese man, who could speak English very well. I talked to him e.g. about the upcoming Expo 2010 in Shanghai and about the Beijing's youth, which - according to him - has been too much influenced by the U.S. kind of culture. I agreed totally. I also asked some advice on Shanghai, which was pretty helpful also.

Tomorrow morning we would get offboard from the train and seek our next place to stay - Captain Hostel - near the Huangpu river (for those of you who know, in the north part of the Bund).