Beijing’s Full of It

There are many exciting historical places to visit in Beijing, such as the Great Wall and Tianemen Square, a historically historical place in which visitors get to see the preserved bodies of approximately 203.5 million tourists who died standing in line to see Mao Tze Tung’s preserved dead body, and also the beautiful Forbidden City, where enthusiastic tourists explore vast palatial structures and admire historical beds and historical spittoons until they starve to death searching for the exit.

So this blog’s hearty recommendation is: The hell with it.

But here are a few obligatory pictures of our trip to the Great Wall of “T-Shirts Onry 1 Dorrar For Two Give You Very Chip No Wait OK OK I Give You Better Plice You Come Back Come Back!!” China anyway so we can get it out of our collective systems and move on to our real topic today, which is WAY more exciting than staring at 3 billion miles of crusty brown bricks:

This is SO EXCITING! Look! MORE brown bricks!! WHEE!!!

Water! Water! You yes you water only 20 kuai fresh from mountain spring pocket come buy now!

Translation: No Money.

Speaking of money, that brings us to our topic for today, which is food. Food in Beijing is surprisingly cheap — prices start from about RMB4-12 million per dish at eating establishments whose clientele does not primarily consist of cockroaches the size of Kelly Clarkson.

Ha ha! Just joshing with you! The food here is perfectly safe for consumption, if you don’t eat it.

Beijing cuisine is very unique, in which it has a McDonalds approximately every 3 cubits, unlike major western cities, which average 5 per pica.

Gourmet Beijing food.

But for the less culinarily adventurous, your food choices here are pretty much limited to say, every damn thing from delicious pork dumplings to braised little turtles. I can’t possibly begin to describe them all here, but hopefully these pictures will convey enough to show you my amazingly crap photography skills:

Little Dragon dumplings

And you thought I was making this up.

So

Damn

Tasty

Can’t

Feel

Tongue

Too

Much

M

S

G…

As you may have noticed, food in Beijing mostly comes in three sizes: Large, Extra Large, and Large Enough to End World Hunger.

Candied fruit kebabs.

On the snack food front, these perfectly normal homocidal maniacs hawking candy-coated fruit on sticks will literally stick it to you until you buy something or bleed to death from that puncture wound on your neck, whichever comes first. So approach with extreme caution, or preferably, a machete.

Scorpions on a Stick: Still alive.

Finally, if your motto is “Live to eat”, you should definitely try out this scorpion delicacy — it stings in your mouth initially, but after that, it’s out of this world. At least that’s what my friends tell me, with their dying breaths. That probably means they don’t get to try the preserved pig entrails.