Bizzare Foods with Krista

After months and months of watching Andrew Zimmern in California and thinking of how I will someday be there... I finally arrived. We headed to the Donghuamen Night Market. There was a wide variety of bugs and fish and EVERYTHING you could imagine. Our first stop on the weird food trip was scorpion. Jeff and I opted to eat the smaller yellowish scorpions. They were super salty and tasted like pumpkin seeds- exactly like cooked pumpkin seeds. It was crunchy and kinda delicious. Chris was handed a giant black one from a girl who couldn't eat both and he chowed down that one. Such a champ!
The next stop was free silk worms from a guy from Seattle we met. They were absolutely disgusting. Andrew Zimmern described them as tasting like cow poop and that's what it was like. Crunchy on the outside with mushy disgusting on the inside. I think it lasted like 2 seconds in my mouth before I spit it out. We had some Ostrich meat that was delicious as well as dumplings and fried icecream. All in all it was an amazing experience- exactly like you see on tv!

Yesterday was spent exploring the Summer Palace- the summer residence of the old emperors. We took the subway to a stop and supposedly just had to hope on a bus 375 to the summer palace. Well... there was no bus 375 so we hailed a taxi. This taxi proceeded to almost hit a pedistrian while crossing the street. Literally- we were inches away from this guy!

The summer palace was great- very pretty, but very touristy. All the building were amazing, but somehow they managed to put a tourist shope or store in each one of these ancient buildings. We did however become celebrities while there. So many Asian people took pictures with us! It was awesome.

Our ride home from summer palace was equally as interesting. We again couldn't find our bus to get to the subway so we ended up talking to a few cab drivers who wanted almost double of what we paid to get there because of the traffic. We finally talked some guy into Y40 (less than $10) to take us to some subway stop. When we walked to his car we realized it was just his little POS car and NOT a taxi. We got in anyways and he began to drive. Apparently, he enjoyed driving in the bike lane during traffic until of course there were bikers. He proceeded to get over into regular lanes, but WAIT there was a huge bus in the lane he wanted to get into. He proceeded to hit the bus and we had to pull over. The driver had to pay Y100 to the bus driver so he could leave. After this he drove us "away from the traffic" down a small abandoned road. I started putting money in my shoe getting ready for him to rob us. However, all turned out ok- I am alive and we made it to our train stop.

We spent our last night in Beijing hanging out on the bench outside our hostel driving 40 cent beers with some new found friends from Canada, England and Belgium. We leave tonight on our overnight train to Shanghair to have even more adventures!

I'll keep you posted.

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