Lindsay Maizland

Personal blog that I updated while studying abroad in Beijing in Summer 2015. Below is one post. 

王府井

Tucked in an alley off of Beijing’s walking street, lined with high-end stores like Nike and Zara, lies the less-glamourous but more interesting Wangfujing Snack Street. The street is known for it’s “strange” 小吃 (xiao chī, snacks) including fried scorpion on-a-stick, squid on-a-stick, lamb on-a-stick… basically anything you want on-a-stick.

On a Friday afternoon, the street was incredibly crowded. Tour buses were parked outside the street’s entrance, and groups of Chinese and Korean tourists were led past the food vendors by tour guides waving yellow flags in the air. Teenagers often stopped in the middle of the street to snap selfies with their freshly cooked meat sticks.

Most of the food vendors were busy taking orders and replenishing stocks; only a few called out to the tourists slowly walking by. When I stopped to take photos at a stall selling seahorses and scorpions on-a-stick, the man behind the counter attempted to persuade me to try some. He exclaimed in Chinese, “They are actually really good!” I smiled and shook my head: “I don’t think so.”

Only a few tourists dared to try the scorpions. Most people on the street held meat sticks flavored with a salty, spicy seasoning. We decided to try lamb kebabs, sweet sticky rice in a fresh pineapple bowl and roasted pigeons. All three were delicious (the pigeons were a little bit tricky to eat because of all of the bones).

Wangfujing is not the norm in China. When we first started walking down the street, one of my friends said, “Honestly I thought all of China would be like this. This is what you see in the movies.” But in reality, bustling streets lined with food vendors are quite rare in Beijing.

Wangfujing exists purely for foreign and Chinese tourists. It’s a novelty, kind of like going to a carnival in the United States. Americans don’t eat fried twinkies and elephant ears regularly; Chinese people also don’t eat scorpion or starfish on a daily basis. According to one of my Chinese teachers, “even Chinese people think the [at Wangfujing] food is strange.”

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