Food Glorious Food...

... hot sausage and mustard. While we're in the mood, cold jelly and custard.
- for anyone who doesn't get that, shame on you!

Perhaps even more important to the Shanghaiese than shopping is food. Life seems to revolve around it and every meal is an experience. For a start, it's a very social event: everybody picks lots of little things from the menu and they're all placed in the middle of the table then everybody eats some everything. It's good that you can then talk about the food because everybody knows what everything tastes like, but my Mandarin phrasebook does say that this culture of eating from the same bowl is the main factor in China's high leves of Hepatitis B. Lukily for me, then, three out of my nine injections I had before coming was to protect me from that, so hopefully I should be OK.

The Chinese don't like to waste any part of an animal, and I mean any part. My first two meals included marinated chicken feet, a noodle soup with cow stomach (not sure which one, though. Maybe the lining of them are all the same) and congealed duck's blood, a fish soup with congealed pig's blood, shredded jellyfish and lots, lots more. Unlike Lin, I can't yet tell the difference between duck's and pig's blood, but give me time!

At Yuyuan Garden on Thursday we had the Shanghaiese speciality: steamed crabmeat dumplings. In the restaurant we were sitting by a window that looked into the kitchen, so you could see how they were being made and how quickly they were being made too. One person to make the dough, one person to roll the dough into perfect small circles and put the right amount of crabmeat on them, one person to wrap it up into a ball and put in on a steamer, and one person to put them into the steamer. There was a huge ball of crabmeat on the table they were working on, and you wondered just how many crabs must have gone into it considering how little meat there is on a single crab. We ordered 24 of these dumplings. I tried to eat my first one and bit off about half of it. That was a bit of a failure, as I hadn't banked on quite how much juice there was inside! Da then instructed me on how to eat it properly: you bite a small hole and suck out all the juice, then dip it into some vinegar and put the whole thing into your mouth. And very tasty is was too.

Yesterday came the most interesting eating experience yet. "Have you ever had hotpot before?" Da asked me in the taxi to one of these massive shopping centres we'd be eating in. "Well, I've had Lancershire hotpot and casseroles and stuff," I said. This hotpot was going to be quite different, though. When we got to the basement of the shopping centre and found the hotpot place we sat down in a row by the bar. On the bar in front of each stool was a metal hole cut into the wood where you were to put your pot. We got a menu each, and flicking through some of the pages I knew this was going to be, umm, different (diddorol-gwahanol iawn sort of thing). For example, there were two pages for meat, the second being your average thinly cut ham, beef, lamb etc., and this is what was on the first page (as it's written), with pictures to go with each one: Pork Brain; Pork Liver; Pork Kidney; Pork Intestines; Deep Fried Crispy Pork Skin; Pork Tendons; Duck's Intestinal; Hollow Throat; Poultry Stomach; Cattle Stomach; Chicken Heart; Chicken Stomach. You'll be glad to know that the only one of these that we had was Hollow Throat and neither Da nor Lin could say which animal it had come from. It didn't really taste of much, but was quite chewey and elasticy. Anyway, we all ordered our own individual hotpot - a metal bowl of boiling water with different things added to it, a bit like a broth - and it was put in our individual holes which keep the water boiling. Mine was a mushroom one. Then we ordered the food to put in it. Da kept asking me what I wanted but, not knowing whether Pork Tendons was tastier that Duck's Intestinal, thought it better to let him decide. He kept putting 1s and 3s in different boxes on the order paper, saying "oh, you'll like this one" each time. I couldn't believe how much stuff he was ordering and I kept saying "don't you think we've got enough now?", him replying with "no, no, lets get some more". After a good 10 minutes he hands the paper to the waitress and the chef gets going with this monster order. In the meantime, as if this wasn't enough, Lin went to another stall to get yet more food and came back with 10 dumplings and a massive bowl of spiced vegetables, tofu and fat. Da doesn't even like spicy food, so it was up to just the two of us to get through this bowl of stuff. We started to eat (I found it odd that you could just get food from another stall and eat it there but the waitress didn't seem to care) and then the hotpot food came... and came... and came. It included (I can't remember it all, I'm just going by what I can see on the photo - I couldn't fit it all into the frame!) a plate of about 20 slices of mutton each; frozen tofu; bean sprouts; some sort of Chinese lettuce; bamboo shoots; mini omlette-type things; mini sausage-type things; Chinese cabbage; shrimp; the hollow throat; some weird rolled-up meatyfishy thing which none of us could remember what it was; and three different sauces. And these weren't just little tasters of each one, these were big portions overflowing from big bowls and plates. And then we began. You basically put the raw meat & vegetables into the hotpot and let it cook. I had no idea how long each thing would take to cook so was asking Da if it was OK to eat all the time. It didn't really matter with the vegetables but I wanted to make sure with the meat. It all tasted quite good, especially the omlettes and the sausages, although fishing it out of the pot was a little tricky at times and each time you dunked your slotted spoon in to have a look you'd find a piece of mutton or something that you missed last time and is now way over cooked. I looked on nervously when Da put two large blue raw shrimp in my hotpot. "And when will these be done?" I asked. "When they turn pink" he said, and after only about 30 seconds in the boiling water he fished them out and put them in my bowl and told me to eat. "Iechyd Da" I said to myself as I started to peel the first one but, not coming out of its shell easily and noticing a little grit along its back, I decided it would be best to wrap the two of them in a piece of tissue and hand it to the waitress before he saw. Somehow we managed to finish almost everything, although it was Da and Lin who ate the most. I can't understand how it all physically fitted inside them! We all needed a long sit down to let our food diguest so headed for the cinema on the top floor. We watched Kung Fu Panda first, which was very funny including for the Chinese who seemed to get a lot of in-jokes. Then, deciding we still couldn't really move, we watched Hancock - some good special effects, but not much of a storyline. All the while, Da and Lin were munching on the biggest bag of sweet popcorn the place sold and after the second film had finished they said they were hungry again and asked me where I wanted to go for supper. "Supper?!" I said, "You've got to be joking!"