Sweet and Sour: Skewered Delights

大家好！

Greek Man here with the first installment of "Sweet and Sour", GMB's column regarding all the fine things you can eat in China. And what better way to kick it off than with something all Greeks are familiar with: skewered food! That's right, not only do the Chinese love skewered meat, they skewer EVERYTHING. From vegetables to bean curd (tofu) to...bugs!?

Click the jump to find out more!



Here in China 串 （chuan = skewer) is one of the prime traditional "fast foods" that can be found literally everywhere. There are restaurants that specialize in chuan but you can also find tons of chuan food stands at fairs, events or even just on the street as you go to work. It's cheap and very gratifying because you can mix a wide variety of skewered foods, combined with some noodles or soup and a nice bottle of beer.


Yeap! That's a chicken foot flipping the bird.

Speaking of variety, I did mention above that the Chinese skewer everything and I do mean it. A few days ago Kim and I along with a friendly couple, went to a Temple Fair in the Haidian district. There were tons of different food stands and a lot of them had chuan as well. The most striking of all the things they had of course were the skewered bugs. Yes, there are people here that eat bugs. Namely scorpions, ants, cicadas and more. Sadly I neglected to take a picture so just picture a full-sized black scorpion with a wooden stick going through its body. Cultural differences can be really shocking sometimes eh?

Despite that, though, I highly recommend to anyone visiting China sometime in the future to hit up a chuan place. Check out the picture below for some of the delights we had after the fair and I'll catch you up next time for some Korean BBQ!

再见！