Street Snacks

All around Beijing, there are opportnities to buy snacks on the street. These range from the bizzarre at Snack Street to little candied "apples" at parks and on street corners. Snack street is a block-long attraction in downtown Beijing where vendors (highly regulated these days) hawk everything from deep fried soft shell crabs, to fruit, to crickets (yes, insects), to scorpians on a stick (see photo of what Snack Street has to offer). I haven't been daring enough to go beyond the soft shell crabs, although I've witnessed others chomping down on scorpians... yum! Snack Street is a bit of an anomalie, but elsewhere in Bejing, we frequently see chestnuts roasting, fresh kettle corn popping, jian bing (a snack in which a crepe is folded over a chunk of deep fried dough and slathered with sauce... honestly, not my favorite snack, but very popular with the students), and the omnipresent candied hawthorne. The hawthorne (see photo) looks a lot like a small candied apple, but they're more tart and really tasty. After an internet search, we discovered that the "haw" (as its locally known) or hawthorne is a relative of the rose and has great medicinal properties (e.g. alieviates stomach ailments as well as heart disease). I guess I'll have to eat more of them :-)