This is a night market and snack street area to the east of the Forbidden City. The snack street has some good things but is mainly for shock value – you can watch a grill guy putting live scorpions on skewers. You can get really good chuar there (triple the cost of chuar at home) as well as grilled corn, takoyaki, and a very good sandwich that was like a cross between shawarma and a guo kui. I got some shan xi dao shao mian (shanxi style knife-cut noodles) which just made me homesick for the Chengdu version.
The tourist requisite scorpion picture:
The foreigner gouging is rampant here, worse than India. The convenience stores and restaurants along the hostel street have English signs and most services charge outrageous prices: sixty kuai for a 40 minute foot massage, seven kuai per kg for laundry, two kuai to send a one page fax. When I ask at the hostel about a cab to the airport they want to charge 150 kuai to call me a taxi, a fifty percent markup. The girl suggests I walk a couple blocks to the main road to flag my own cab and offers to write ‘I would like to go to the airport’ in Chinese for me. (No, that's OK, thanks.) Next time I am going to find a hotel that Chinese people stay at.
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