Reader discretion advised; this post is all about food! I like this sculpture which is near the entrance of the main venue - the strength of the hand, the poised chopsticks - hopeful, open minded, hungry....
Street food is some of the most accessible when there is a language barrier - you can see what is available without having to puzzle through a menu and you can order and pay with hand signals. I like being able to watch the food being prepared - you can observe how clean it is, and more importantly you can gauge if the cook cares about what they are doing or not. A good cook has been recognizeable in any country I have been in so far - they should move with a kind of attentive confidence, even when working very quickly.
Some of the street food in this city can be identified by foreign eyesight (corn, fruit, chou dofu , the lamb skewers) but most of it can't and the only way I am going to figure out what these things are is to bite into them.
These steamed rice dumplings were all very good. The fluffy white one was sweet and tasted like the dough had been fermented a bit; the smaller ones had seasoned meat fillings.
These little round sandwiches are sold everywhere and have a variety of fillings. This was the first one I tried and I didn't like it very much - the meat slices and bread were far too chewy and there was a lot of very oily sauce. Interesting flavours, but I will not try again for a while.
Noodles with sauces, crunchy soybeans, green onions, and some kind of pickle; stir with chopsticks and slurp up. Pretty good and tingly with Sichuan pepper.
Beijing duck wrapped up for a customer.
Rabbit heads. These are enormously popular; most grocery stores have piles of these beside the cooked chickens and ducks. I watched several people enjoying them and am starting to wonder what they do with the rest of the rabbit. Someday I will try one; not today.
Quail eggs cooked in little pans, skewered and seasoned. This girl displayed the 'good cook' concentration so I got some. They were really good.
Dessert - rice cakes with soybean powder, a sweet syrup that tasted a little burned, and sesame seeds. Nice job making the rice cakes chewy and crunchy at the same time; the syrup I could have done without.
The mid afternoon food festival crowd. Today is the second last day; I am glad I didn't come on the first weekend.
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