Eating Corbicula with Preserved Brassica in Zhouzhuang

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Taking advantage that Rene, Jenny's friend was visiting Shanghai, we decided to go to Zhouzhuang, a town only 1.5 hours away from Shanghai and best known as: "Venice of the East".

Zhouzhuang is indeed a beautiful old town, full of canals and bridges. Before 1980, tourism was not developed there but thanks to a Chinese artist that sold a painting of one of the bridges in more than US$32,000,000 to the President of the Occidental Petroleum in 1984, became well known to the rest of China.

A trip to Zhouzhuang should not exceed 4 hours. Immediately after arriving, we were surrounded by old ladies selling maps, offering hotels, etc. After a few minutes walking into the town, we arrived to one of the main streets, which we recognized because of the hundreds of kiosks and stores selling all kinds of stuff; from live baby turtles to calligraphy, from shoes to (our favorite) "peepee boys" which are little plastic toys that after being submerged in water seem to "pee" (Now someone explain me WHY this is a Chinese souvenir?)

Anyways, there are plenty of opportunities for taking pictures and we took lots of them. As the hours passed, we started to get scared since by that time all the streets looked the same!! (later we would realize, they were the same... the town has basically 4 streets only) and it was SO hot... We decided to have lunch next to the canals.

We went in the restaurant and we were presented with the unique opportunity to choose between Corbicula, Brassica, Bellmya Purificata, Mylopharyngodon, Cipangopaludina and other delicacies ... Rene, Jenny and myself just did not know what to do (other than laugh) so of course, we took a picture of the menu and decided to use our Chinese vocabulary to order rice and vegetables.

Until now, I have no idea what that menu included, although my guess is that when translating the dishes, they used scientific names of...fish??? Other suggestions??????

By the way, wearing your underwear on the street is optional... Who says my neighbours are weird?

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Comments

[jenny]

thx
great trip, beautiful day! thx 4 organizing it!!!

[Liz Warwick]

great photos
Love the pictures - you could feel the steaminess of the heat coming off the photograph. Am coming to China the week of October 24. More details to follow. Nihow!!

[Natasha]

looks gorgeous! wish I could've gone! see you next week!

[Brian]

Yummy!!
Nothing reminds me of home like a big steaming plate of corbicula and brassica! But, yes indeed they are the scientific names for the food. That particular dish would be clams and cabbage (or some member of the brassica family)

[Hotdog]

Accomodation
Pictures are lovely, how are the accomodation?