2009 08 10-11 – Days 45-46 – Urumqi
One of the ubiquitous hole-in-the-wall cheap eateries:
If a place is full of locals then you know it must have something good going on and so we joined the queue in the doorway for four of the 24 or so tightly packed stools.
Uncertain with our combined Chinese skills and the speed of the place we fell back on the old trick of pointing at our neighbours tastey looking food and indicating that we'd have what he's having. This is what we got:
Pretty spicey, but survivable and tastey.
Stopping at a street seller's stall, Akanuma persuaded us to buy this, touting it as the 'King of Fruit':
For those who don't know, this is a
Durian fruit. It's opening is held tightly closed by the wire to protect the fruit I'm sure, but perhaps more importantly to protect the noses of those who walk past te seller's stall! Yes, the Durian fruit stinks to high heaven! The smell is such that any sane person might question why would anyone want to eat such a thing!? Durian fans, of which there are many in Asia, claim it is delicious, but the aroma is so off-putting it puts the most pungent French cheese to shame. It's so bad that many hostels and hotels in Asia ban it from their premises! We hadn't seen such a sign in our place and no one smelled us coming, so we were able to return to our room with our royal prize. Curious about the unusual combination of apparent deliciousness and obvious stinkiness, I was persuaded to try some, scooping out a small mouthful of the soft inner flesh... in the flavour there was echoes of the smell that didn't endear it to me, but there was something intriguing about other subtle flavours that floated elusively around the central flavour. Although I thought I would not go back for more, following my initial unfavourable encounter, after a little while I found myself reaching in for more! I couldn't help myself! My second mouthfull was, however, enough to satisfy my curiosity and I didn't have the desire or compulsion to return for more.
Urumqi has a thriving daily night market, the best part of which is given over to feeding locals and tourists.
Despite our Durian adventures earlier, I wouldn't set out to eat some of the more exotic offerings, but Rob had different ideas, challening us as soon as he saw these:
On the left are silk worm grubs and on the right some unknown but substantial beetle/bug/insect thingy. At first I thought the silk worms looked more palatable than the bugs, but that was before one of the silk worms moved! They were still alive! At this point I felt properly repulsed and a little bit queasy, but we'd made our choices, and the chef was busy preparing our dishes.
The silk worms, rather surprisingly, required more work to eat than the bugs, as we were advised to rip the grub in two and remove the small and thin black central part before popping the two parts in your mouth. Though fairly repulsive to look at, both grubs and bugs turned out to be not too bad... can't say I'd be rushing back for seconds (ever again), but they were definitely edible.
A Uighur muslim promotes his fishy carousel.
Only after we'd ordered these seafood barbeque sticks and begun to eat them did we remember our trivia: Urumqi has a place in the
Guiness Book of Records for the most remote city from any sea in the world (2,500 km). Despite such geographical opposition, the barbequed seafood was tastey and we saw no reason to not finish what we'd ordered.
Anyone brave enough to devour this satanic offering would no doubt curry favour with the Lord of Darkness.... I didn't see any takers and I wasn't going to hang around to find out!
