Adventures at the Grocery Store

There's a surprising amount of Western products available at the grocery stores here, especially Carrefour and Wal-Mart. Still, those familiar foods are vastly outnumbered by the just plain weird things (from our perspective, of course) you'll find in any Chinese grocery store. These pictures were taken at our last trip to Wal-Mart.



Here we have rotisserie mystery birds. They're quite small...hopefully quail and not something else!




There's a Chinese saying that if its back faces the sky, it can be eaten, and that's no joke. What I find more impressive, though, is the resourcefulness in using all different parts of the animals. This picture didn't turn out too great, but I had to post it anyway. On the left, you have pig stomach. On the right, congealed pig blood.




Along those same lines, here we have pig feet and backbone. (Actually, we've had backbone soup in Korea and it's quite tasty, especially if you call it by its Korean name instead of "backbone soup"!)




Finally, here's Joel's personal favorite: griskin laver soup. Laver is seaweed, but what, exactly, is griskin? According to thefreedictionary.com, it's "the spine of a hog." But Joel has always used it to refer to that special kind of "meat" found in Chicken McNuggets and the Mr. Rib sandwich from school lunches, a.k.a. gristle and skin. Yummy!