I am proud to say I eat just about any food.  If it is on a menu, I’ll try it.  As a young kid, I ate rattlesnake, squirrel, turtle steak, frog legs, kangaroo tail soup and just about any odd item found on a menu.  The squirrel and frog legs I hunted, which makes me sound a bit like a hillbilly, but it was fun as a kid.  I really looked forward to new foods in China.  However, overall, it was disappointing.  Despite us driving past miles and miles of red peppers piled high in the fields, the food was boiled and bland.  Boiled broccoli, boiled cauliflower, boiled bok choy.  Also, the Chinese do not differentiate between breakfast, lunch and dinner foods.  In the morning you had much of the same foods on the buffet the prior night.  Very few of the dishes were great.  However, I did get to add to my list of unusual foods, which included:

• Camel tendons
• Donkey Skin
• Carp, full of bones
• Pigs Ear, nothing but cartilage, what else?
• Horse sausage

My main question was who got the good cuts of meat if in the fine restaurants they were feeding me donkey skin and camel tendons???

No, I did not get to eat the above fish.  They were hanging in a Shanghai ally.  Oddly enough, I did not see any flies in these open air markets full of hanging food.

 

 

 

 

Many restaurants displayed their fresh food outside.

We were told this was a Muslim  market so I would not think these are grilled pigs feet, so I am not sure what they are.

 

 

 

We actually ate at the restaurant which had this lamb cooking out front, next to the parking lot and basketball court.  So I guess our food was likely cooked here as well.

I chewed on the chicken foot just long enough to get the idea.  Next to the chicken foot is local brewed beer.  During our two weeks in the China mainland, never did we see a proper beer glass.  Since one cannot drink the water, we drank beer.  Hey, we did what we had to do…  Also, the beer was cheaper than bottled water, but not much stronger.  All beer was about 3% vs. the more normal 5-7%.

 

The birthday cake was for a nice lady in our group, Holly, not Horry.  The Chinese are good at imitation, but sometimes come up a bit short.  Apparently they saw a photo of a birthday cake and decorated it as best they could.  Those are not strawberries on top, rather they are cherry tomatoes.  Another error in imitation was serving tomato paste in place of ketchup with french fries.