Wangfujing Snack Street 2: Scorpion's Revenge!

What's your first memory of China? Mine, strangely, concerns scorpions. Fresh off the plane, I bowled up to my hostel (somewhere near Xinjiekou) and met an investment banker from Birmingham who invited me to accompany him to Wangfujing Snack Street. I did. I ate a scorpion. The jet-lag hit. I barfed. It was horrible. I wanted to go home. That was more than three years ago, and I've never been back... until now.

First thing to notice ... it's really, really popular with Chinese tourists. Second thing? The scorpions. The first stall off Wangfujing Avenue has skewered scorpions on sticks, the uppermost critter on each still wriggling it's little legs, very much alive. It's a compelling piece of food theatre, to be sure. A skewer of three costs RMB 20.

I was expecting the snack street to be a sort of extreme culinary assault course, and, well, it is. But there are plenty of "normal" snacks for the effete of stomach. This Turkish-type barbecue was pretty good (RMB 5), despite a meagre bun.

Another lesson I learned on my first visit to Wangfujing Snack Street was the existence of the five mao note. I got hoodwinked twice. This time, stallholders were still up to their old tricks, handing back short change, misquoting prices, etc. It was all fairly good-humoured though.

These massive bing wrapped around veggies seemed like a decent deal for RMB 5. The few waiguoren tourists I came across in the market were all eating them. Wimps.

Mountains and mountains of chuan'r (RMB 5). Ever popular, and at least you know they won't have been sitting around for days, unlike ...

Shudder. To my mind it's these creepy crawlies that perpetuate the self-fulfilling fallacy of Chinese food as "other" in the eyes of foreigners. The preconception that "they eat everything" and "there's nothing I'll like" is both played upon (one stall holder claimed they had cat) and upheld by folks returning home and showing bug photos to their friends. It's a clever loop probably masterminded by some association of Chinese restaurants abroad. It's like comedian Paul Merton said when asked, after his televised jaunt around China, what he really missed from home ... "a proper Chinese meal".

Tripe, tripe, tripe. There's plenty of nasty-looking Lao Beijing snacks too.

For a more civilised sit-down meal, this side-alley has a host of cute noodle and dumpling eateries, with some nice al fresco seating.

Hai dan, or sea urchin. Peel it open and slurp up the gooey yellow innards. I strongly think eating this here carries the equivalent health risk of a plate of fugu (Japanese puffer fish) prepared by Muhammad Ali.

What about the sweet stuff? Of course, churros! I bet these weren't here three years ago. Interestingly, they're five kuai cheaper than Nanluogu Xiang.

And these tang strawberries look pretty tasty too. Again, like most everything else, they're RMB 5 per stick.

The stall-holder claimed this dish was Chinese ice-cream. For some reason all I could think of was my ex-wife. One too many blasts from the past for me.