Wángfǔjǐng

I recently spent some time at Wángfǔjǐng which is a road where there are a long strip of Chinese merchants selling street food. Here's an (overexposed) picture of myself there.

The spot is famous for selling a lot of strange food, including caterpillars, silk worm cocoons, and various internal organs.  Merchants aggressively yelled at me as we weaved around tour groups.  With the pushy sales and questionable food, I basically got a lot of practice saying "bú yaò!", which roughly translates into...

After ordering some boring food, I did go ahead and try some new things.  I ate something called bee cocoon, a bit of snake meat, and a scorpion.  The scorpion tasted surprisingly similar to soft shell crab - I guess anything deep friend and crunchy has some similarities.  The bee cocoon was somewhat like the scorpion, but a little less crunchy.  Snake meat, which was cooked, tasted a lot like raw squid you would find in a sushi place (I find both relatively tasteless and a bit chewy).

(Yup, that's scorpion all right)

One merchant provided the most entertainment of the night, though I am not sure his pitch was sound business strategy (you'll see what I mean in a second).  We approached his stand and started asking what various things were, per usual.  In particular, there was one item that was not at any other stand, so we were very curious about it.  The man first started grabbing his chest and flapping it around, so we thought it might be breast. But it really did not look like breast, so we asked again.  He finally said it was "testicles." So naturally we asked, "Who's testicles?" By way of answering, he started jumping up and down, grabbed his own crotch, and yelled "Wǒ de! Wǒ de!" (It's mine! It's mine!).

Bú yaò!