Did you think I was going to forget about our night market food challenge?? Well, I almost did! The last couple of weeks of a round are always crazy and I seriously almost forgot that I left you hanging!
So, without further ado…
After we ate our delicious Peking duck in Beijing, we headed a couple of blocks over to the night market. This place is full of just about anything you’d never want to imagine skewered and ready to be fried or grilled for you to eat.
Sheep penis, anyone? No, we didn’t eat that!!
Only one other guy was as brave as Julie and me and we all felt fine the next day. Stomachs of steel, people. Stomachs of steel.
We started off with the seahorses…
I think Jules was trying to swallow it whole!
I know most people think they’re cute, but those weirdo looking ones at the Georgia Aquarium have made me think they are more strange than cute, so I had no real issue eating this one. It was salty, a little crunchy and a little chewy. All in all- not horrible.
From the same stall we chose giant grasshoppers…
Attempting to mask sheer terror with fake smile in 3…2…1…
Okay, this one was tough. I know it is hard to see under the chili and garlic sauce, but that is one really big bug. I had a total girly freak-out trying to get it in my mouth…
Once in, it wasn’t much better. It was so big and crunching its body, wings and little legs was a bit more than I had bargained for. The taste and texture was like a dry, crispy grass. I guess you are what you eat. Or where you live. What do grasshoppers eat? Anyway, those little legs and wings were tough to get rid of. Mouths full of grasshopper…
Thank God, Julie found a guy selling beer so we had something to wash them down with.
Next up was the silk worms…
Looking at these things was hard enough, but when we decided to eat them I was pretty worried. Our Chinese friend, C, told us she has eaten before and not to be scared. “Just don’t eat the black thing inside.” I don’t know if the black thing is the actual worm or its excrement or what, but the last thing you want to do when trying to choke down a creepy crawly is worry about eating around something. Julie said it tasted like tofu gone bad, but I thought the taste was okay. It was creamy and bland. The outer part was fairly inedible though. It was like the outside of a corn kernel. I’d say this worm was slightly better than that dried one we ate in South Africa.
Then came the scorpions…
Jules and I went with a skewer of the smaller ones and our friend got a big black one. The big black one was some kind of scary. I ate his tail. Take that, Mr. Scorpion…
Jules said the shell of the big one was like crunching on seashells…
I’m sure you’re not going to believe me, but the small scorpions were delicious. Really. I swear if someone brought me a skewer of them right now I would eat them with no hesitation. No joke. If you like a snack that is crunchy and salty, you’d like them too.
We then ate the worst tasting thing of the night, the centipede...
At this point in the night I wasn’t really scared to eat it, but it tasted like ammonia. Maybe it had gone bad. How were we to know if we were being served a spoiled centipede? Just know if you are ever trapped somewhere starving- eat all the other bugs first before the centipede.
We ended the night with a starfish…
Not scary at all and after the centipede, which the wife took a huge bite of and I had only had a small taste thanks to her warning, it was the only thing we could stomach.
It tasted like the sea. And the beach. It was very gritty inside like eating a mouth full of sand…
The other wives tried this one and I was very proud! Way to be, girls!!
So there it is, our crazy night market challenge. It was fun and a little insane and yes I made us use the disposable toothbrush from the hotel that night.
No comments:
Post a Comment