Wangfujing Snack Street

There are many sites in and around Beijing that must be seen at least once in a lifetime, but only a handful warrant multiple visits. Apart from the Great Wall, Wangfujing Snack Street is one of the few attractions that has consistently drawn me back time and again. Wangfujing is a busy shopping district with two main areas where strange treats are sold alongside more mundane fare. Tourists mill about the rows of food stalls, many with looks of complete shock on their face when they see the delicacies awaiting them. Mysterious sea creatures and insects are top draws for the daring. Some merely gawk at others without trying any of the skewers on offer. The footpath is frequently hosed to get rid of the organic materials that have been dropped, spat out, vomited, or otherwise excreted on to the ground.

I compiled an incomplete list of items that I tried for the first time at the mother of all snack streets.

Visit 1

• Starfish
• Seahorse
• Sea snake,
• Soup made of cows inner organs
• Stinky tofu

Visit 2

• Scorpion
• Snake
• Silkworm

Visit 3

• Sea urchin
• Lamb penis
• Duck heart

Visit 4

• Bees
• Dragonfly
• Lamb testicles
• Under the counter cat

*****

“Food is our common ground, a universal experience.”

James Beard

Guilin Grub

While I was in Guilin it rained continuously. The heavy downpour usually kept me indoors or wandering from one restaurant to another. I had a chance to barter for a variety of fresh fare, from fish to frogs to turtles. Since the precipitation was intense most of the locals had headed for the shelter of their homes, leaving prospective customers scarce at dining establishments.

The managers of the restaurants vied for my attention, energetically trying to usher me in to their eateries. I nonchalantly perused the edible creatures and estimated how appetizing they would be. One shopkeeper grabbed a toad and held it inches away from my face, but his tactic proved to be futile as I moved on to other options. I settled for a large fish after finding the exotic creatures too expensive for my liking.

*****

"Tis not the meat, but 'tis the appetite makes eating a delight."

- Sir. John Suckling -

Temple of Heaven

Heaven. Earth. Sun. Moon.

Four elemental temples are scattered around Beijing, with the Temple of Heaven the most spectacular of the quartet. The name of the temple in Chinese is Tiantan, which translates to "Altar of Heaven". On a cloudless summer's day, I wandered its grounds for several hours. As the sun shined up above, beads of sweat graced my forehead. Rivulets of perspiration slowly trickled downwards, tracing the symmetric lines of my face. Effortlessly combining aesthetic principles and cultural values, the design of the temple was similarily well thought out. Squares, representing earth, and circles, representing heaven, serve as the chief design motifs for impressive structures within the temple complex such as the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, the Imperial Vault of Heaven, the Echo Wall, and the Circular Mound Altar.

*****

“My soul can find no staircase to heaven unless it be through earth's loveliness.”

- Michelangelo -

Stone Forest of Shilin

270 million years in the making, the Shilin Stone Forest is a collection of odd rock formations jutting up from the ground. Located in Yunnan province, Shilin was an easy bus ride away from Kunming. I remained steady as a rock when I entered the forest made of stone. All around me were the strange shapes. It was a dark and rainy day, so the formations seemed even more foreboding. Legend has it that the gods shattered the mountains into smaller fragments so that lovers could have some privacy among the rocks. The scientific explanation is that the area was an ocean before, and when the water subsided these rocks were left behind.

*****

“The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.”

- Bertrand Russell -

ARNABonics

As the global downturn continues many people can no longer afford their expensive hobbies. Instead they have sought out more cost effective means of entertainment. ARNABonics is one such beneficiary of this worldwide trend, as it is a fun, free, and educational alternative to pricey pursuits. ARNABonics is a nonstandard form of English where words in standard usage are concatenated to the tail end of the phrase ARNAB. Anyone can participate in adding new words to the vocabulary. Having rapidly gained in popularity in the past few years, ARNABonics is forecast to rank alongside solitaire, crossword puzzles, and sudoku as one of the primary pastimes of housewives by 2020.

The grammatical rules are easy to learn. The words must seamlessly combine with ARNAB following a concrete syntax. They usually start with B (ARNAB + Bombshell = ARNABombshell or ARNAB + Babe = ARNABabe), but words starting with AB, NAB, and RNAB are also acceptable, though considerably more difficult to construct. As it is a growing field, new words are being continuously created and semantically defined. There is also room for innovation. The ARNACutie provides an interesting case study. Even though Cutie starts with the letter C, and distorts the natural harmony of the five letters A-R-N-A-B, it rhymes with the already established ARNABeauty and is thus a valuable addition to the vernacular.

******

"Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become, in the hands of one who knows how to combine them!"
- Nathaniel Hawthorne -