flinn@seismo.UUCP (E. A. Flinn) (03/24/84)
--- Food for visitors in China is good and plenty of it - somewhat different from Chinese food in North America, which has possibly taken an independent course of evolution. Unless you eat in fancier places than I do you probably won't find culinary delights, except in the big Peking duck places in Beijing, where the duck is superb. The whole meal is duck, from soup onward, with the feet offered as hors d'oeuvres (you pick it up by the ankle and eat the web between the toes, or crunch the whole thing if you're not squeamish). On the boat down the Yangtze River they serve up heaping plates of fresh-water shrimp and eels, which are grand. At breakfast one usually has a choice of a Chinese or a Western breakfast - I never braved the Chinese one, since it looked like steamed dumplings and a thin watery soup made from rice. The only food problems are at formal banquets laid on by your hosts, if you're an official visitor of part of a delegation of some sort. 95% of the food at these banquets is very nice indeed, but you encounter some unfamiliar things, beginning with what the foreign service people call the Eight Horrible Things, the hors d'oeuvres laid out in eight dishes on the lazy suzan in the middle of the table. The Things seem to vary from place to place, but you may find the following: Fish's stomachs - look and taste like wet wadded kleenex. Fried scorpions. Shark lips - look like huge people's lips, all right; laid out on the plate, thingly sliced diagonally like chateaubriand. Deep-fried sparrows - including wings, feet, etc. Look like tennis balls fried in batter until you bite into them. Raw shrimp in the shell. Ancient eggs - chemically aged; don't taste or smell of H2S at all, but the greenish-black yolk, dark brown white, and overall greenslime are not appetizing. Heads of deep-fried sparrows - served separately; you pick them up by the beak and munch them like swedish meatballs at a party (I thought they *were* meatballs with toothpicks in them until the first one I picked up looked back at me). They also have a main course called Dragon and Tiger, a stew with different kinds of soft-textured meat; when I once asked what was in it (always a mistake) the reply was: snake and cat.