Street Food

I'd thought I'd tell you a little today about some of the more interesting food that they have for sale out in front of the school at night. It changes pretty regularly actually, I wonder if some of the people think that maybe certain times of the year are better for their foods or if they are just looking for some area with higher foot traffic. Maybe the oddest thing you see at night are actually the same stands you see during the day, which are fruit stands. They don't have a huge selection of different fruits but it's just not the thing you think that people are likely to buy at 10 o'clock at night, a couple bananas or some watermelon. You also see quite a few stands selling various meats on sticks. It's pretty much anything you can think of put on a stick. To keep it from being cold, people in China hate nothing more then any sort of cold food, McDonalds here seems to be most known for ice cream simply because cold food seems to western, the vendors have their food uncooked and they have little grills going behind them where they cook the food once you order it. This isn't necessarily the most sanitary situation since they pretty much put everything together so that there is definitly some mix between cooked and uncooked meat. There is also this interesting place where they sell various sort of flat breads. These breads are amde right there on a flat round hot stove from batter and have various little coatings put on them. Again this is all pretty much done by hand, literally, so again sterility is not exactly the priority. Some places have other things besides meat on a stick. One place I like has fired chicken something, I say something because I can't really say what part of the chicken it is but it's put into strips battered and deep fired to order. Finally a place I just discovered does a sort of dumping soup. The dumplings are just raw meat put into a little pocket of dough, by hand again. When you go to order it they take six or seven dumpling and boil them for a few minutes. While they're boiling the guy takes a bowl and puts a little plastic bag into it. Into the bag he puts various spices, again with his hand, and then pours some hot water. The dumplings come out and go into this. The bag is tied up in the bowl and then the bag and bowl are put into another bag so I can carry them home without it spilling. It's sort of an ingenious system, I just hope he occasionally washes his hands.