Well. This happened. Last night we went on a lovely food tour around Shanghai with Claire’s work colleagues (<—this does not look spelt right to me). It was a fun little adventure where we took a couple of train stops to a near by district and went to five different food styles.
Our frist stop was soup dumplings with various fillings (mostly pork, which yes I actually ate. Shocking I know!). Me not knowing that a soup dumpling literally had a little soup inside it, attempted to eat the whole thing and proceeded to get unexpected liquid down my throat. This in turn caused me to hack and cough uncontrollably and look like I was an absolute noob at the simple act of eating. I even ate the dumpling that contained crab. Again suprising myself! If you haven’t guessed yet (most of you already know but one can dream that other people outside my friendship group will read this) is that I am quite a fussy eater. I don’t generally like pork unless its bacon or ham, and definitely do not like most seafood either. I did at the start of this year proudly not throw up when I managed to eat an oyster with our lovely friends in Tasmania.
The next place we went to was where the real fun began. The deepfried and spicy Grasshoppers. Yes i did in fact eat one and yes they were surprisingly….okay. Claire ate at least 10 and was completely unfased even when I handed her one with wings attached. A braver woman than I. The others were also much braver than myself and munched down on everything that was served at the table (the hoppers were the most interesting). There was a soup, as well as a sort of scrambled egg dish that i believe had flower pods in it.
Place number three was where, in my opinion, the food got really good. A beef and flat noodle dish and what they called a pineapple bread (or something along those lines) which they stated contained no pineapple at all. It was simply called that because of the way the top looked when it was baked. Apparently that’s a pretty common thing. They also brought out roasted duck and BBQ pork (which i tried and founda actually really good!). The laughs and conversation continued as we finished and made our way to a little hole in the wall food place that gave us some sort of flat bread with squished meat inside. By this point I was quite full and really didn’t have much room to try a lot of it. Again I ate a pork filled bread, and was surprised that it wasn’t awful.
Finally the food tour came to an end at another place that seemed to specialise in skewers. We had a small spicy lamb skewer and finished up with the group around 9pm. After this everyone went their seperate ways and we found ourselves walking to a bar nearby with some of Claire’s new found friends to continue the laughs and entertainment for another few hours. It was a truly lovely evening and it’s a great feeling to know that we haven’t made a huge mistake uprooting our lives to try a new experience.
Well that’s it for now I reckon. I really should be taking more photos but i’ve been getting caught up in the moments and enjoying life. I’ll try better next time.
Talk soon xx.
S.
P.s. My editor is currently at work so this is probably full of errors. Enjoy yelling at your screen whenever you see a mistake.
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