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Hot PotApr 5, 2009
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On our last few days in China, we decided to go to a tea house. A tea house is more like a family gathering place for the afternoon, where people sit and relax, play cards, talk, socialize, eat, dance, sing, and of course drink tea. It was a very enjoyable afternoon watching the locals and letting the world go by, with the exception of every few minutes a vendor of some sort would come by and ask us if we'd like a massage, or if we'd like to clean our ear wax. Yes, I said ear wax. The vendors have a wire spring thing with a bit of fluff on the end, which they insert into the ear. Then they take a huge tweezers, and strum the tines together to make it "sing" and vibrate like a tuning fork. They hold the tweezers against the inserted wire thingy which I guess makes it vibrate and scrub the innards of the ear. Gross. But the vendors seemed to be surprised that we were not interested in this service. We did, however, partake in a massage. Which, possibly thanks to Chinese medical knowledge or something, cleared up our sinuses completely (both of us are currently suffering from minor head colds). After the tea house, we decided to try a traditional Chinese meal called Hot Pot, thereby adding further to our cultural experience. Believe me when I say that Hot Pot meals are not for the faint of heart, which we didn't know at the time. Hot pot means you sit at a table with a giant wok full of boiling oil, or water, or both, and you dip or cook bits of meat and vegetables on sticks into it - like fondue. Except it differs due to the stuff floating around in the oil/water, and the fact that most of the time you have no idea what is on the end of your skewer. Our tour agents recommended we try and "easy" hot pot restaurant, where prior to cooking anything, the waitress brings you into a room with maybe 100 tubs of raw stuff on sticks so that you can choose what it is that you want to eat. But other than being able to determine the meat products from the veg, we still had no idea. Most of the meats were just fleshy pink bits, unless they were fish, in which case they could be confused with the tofu. Some sticks had whole creatures on them, like a fish or a shrimp with heads and legs, but knowing that we would have to eat all the entrails turned us off those. As for the veg, there were such a massive assortment of items that even a market gardener's daughter couldn't even begin to guess if it was some kind of pod, or mushroom, or root of goodness knows what. In order not to look like complete tourist idiots, we simply grabbed bunches of the most innocuous looking sticks and went back to our wok. As we stuffed the first few sticks in, a whole fish head floated gently to the surface, looked at us, and again receded to the murky depths. Carefully we fished around (no pun intended) with a slotted spoon and found an entire grocery store slinking around the bottom of the wok. Ginger, cucumber, bones, beans, blobs of white stuff that could have been noodles, and worst of all about 100 hot peppers chopped in half for "flavour". We also suspect that the things we couldn't identify were food remnants from the previous people - stuff that had fallen off of previous sticks and continued "seasoning" the mix for the next user. At any rate, we were now committed, so we pulled our sticks out (hoping whatever was on the end was cooked) and dipped them into the sauce that our waitress had oh-so-helpfully mixed for us, consisting of sesame oil, about 2 entire heads of minced garlic, onions, salt, sugar, soy sauce, and of course more hot sauce. The tears in our eyes were not just because our tongues and lips were burning off from both the hot peppers and the hot oil. It was also because the innocuous-looking pink meat bits ended up cooking up into gristly, chewy cartilage-like substances not unlike the chicken gizzards I feed my dogs. Or, in other cases, the meat was full of bone fragments like someone had pounded the crap out of the animal first. As for the veg, the root-like stringy things cooked to a consistency of warm tapeworms (with hot sauce) but the other items were edible if our taste buds hadn't already been burnt off. At any rate, we choked down what we could, and then high-tailed it to McDonald's where we gratefully chowed down on Big Mac meals (where we had a choice of side dish - fries, or corn niblets) and freshly deep fried hot banana pies.
