Wan Fu Jin 'food' street.

So you're a tourist in the mysterious Orient. After a busy day buying cut price Diesel Jeans, experiencing the exotic eastern charms of Starbucks, and buying a whole container load of 'authentic' Mao portraits and 100% totally not fake Ming Dynasty Porcelain, you start to feel a little peckish.

Well, if you happen to be in the vicinity of the WanFuJin pedestrian mall in Beijing, you can hang a louie into WanFuJin XiaoJie, and experience the heady delights of 'real' Chinese street cuisine. (In my experience this equated to sub-par fried noodles and watery beer).

Basically, like the aforementioned communist paraphernalia and whatnot, the whole street is based around what foreign people expect to see in craaaaazy China. On a stick. While I couldn't find a restaurant serving live monkey brains, I did eat these:


(pretty oily. crunchy)

But not these:



Or these (skewered but still alive. Though presumably the deep fryer takes care of that):



Or anything from here (which to be fair wasn't actually in WanFuJin):



In the background of the scorpion picture is 'stinky tofu' which I did try. As the name suggests it tastes slightly worse than old socks.