donghuamen night market

After surfing the internet a bit for things not to miss in Beijing, I realized that when we went to the night market a couple of weeks ago, we didn’t go to the one that I thought we had went to.  The night market you usually see on TV is called DongHuaMen and that is where we had been headed, only we got distracted by a smaller version we passed on the way.  So on Sunday we made a second trip to try out the real deal.

At first glance it looks like a long row of food stalls that you’ll never be able to eat your way through, but in reality most stalls sell the same things and, even though we were moving slowly, we walked from one end to the other in less than ten minutes.  In addition to creepy crawlies like we ate at the other market, this one offered lots of other goods on a skewer.  You can get just a regular meat skewer, or try some other animal part you aren’t used to eating like intestines or testicles.  The only “odd” thing I ate was snake (pictured above), but I filled my stomach on other goodies like baozi (stuffed buns), jaozi (dumplings), some random fried stuff, and rice in half a pineapple topped with sugar which was my favorite of the night.

Overall I found this place to be overrated.  Maybe it is because we had already eaten bugs and stuff so the novelty wasn’t there anymore.  But really I think it is because I didn’t find any of the food that night particularly great.  Go just to go, definitely eat a few things because I think it would be really boring if you didn’t, but don’t expect to be wowed by anything you put in your mouth.