I recently had the good fortune to spend 4 days in Beijing for a work conference. This is my third trip to Beijing in the last 18 months and every time I go I have a really great time. It is wonderful place. Of note this time was the Wangfujing Food Market and the Panjiayuan Antiques Market.The food market was great, with all sorts of weird and wonderful gastronomic delights on sale. Everything from Dog Meat Pot to Centipedes on a skewer. I opted for the 4 small scorpions and the skewer of snake pieces. The scorpions were deep fried and were very crunchy and chewy – each one took a good couple of minutes to get down. I was expecting the body to be a gooey combination of liquids and intestines, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was more like sausage meat. Quite tasty indeed. The snake pieces were a little disappointing because they were covered in so much seasoning, including chilli powder, that you couldn’t really get a taste for the meat. Perhaps this was a good thing. It was also very crunchy and chewy. They also had centipedes, grasshoppers, sheep’s penis, big black bugs, and other unrecognizable delights on sale as well, but I limited myself to the scorpions and the snake.
The antiques
market was a real cultural experience and a welcome change from the heavily touristed shopping markets that Beijing is famous for. This market is only open on the weekends and is frequented by many locals, with stalls operated by a wide range of people from the city and the rural areas. As I sat to enjoy a beer at the end of my voyeuristic walking stint, I was joined by an elderly Chinese man. It is very hard to judge the age of Asian people, but if I had to guess I’d say he would have been about 60. He has lived in Beijing his whole life and was very poor. I thought he was prepping me for a sting – I thought he was going to ask me to buy him a meal or give him some m
oney. How narrow our western views of people’s intentions can be. This was not the case and the next 40 minutes turned out to be a very interesting and humbling conversation. He was teaching himself to speak English because he couldn’t afford lessons, so he pulled out his Mandarin-English dictionary and a Dictaphone and asked me if I would pronounce some words for him so he could go home and practice. So I went through 5 pages (H into I) of the dictionary with him – me saying the word in English and him repeating it in Mandarin. What made this most funny is that I was reading words like ‘Hypochlorite’ which made me won
der it what context he was ever going to use some of these words. He knew a lot about world affairs, particularly Australia, America, and Japan. He said he had always wanted to travel overseas but because of his socio-economic status and Government policy he could not get a passport or a visa. This really made me think of just how lucky I am to have the freedom and opportunities to do all the traveling that I get 
to do. Experiences like these are a real highlight when traveling – it is great to see monuments and famous buildings, but nothing beats mixing with the local people to get a real feel for the place.I really really enjoyed this trip to Beijing and can’t wait to go back there again with the family.
