the authentic experience

So last night I went with Frank and some people to dinner. Frank had hired an interpreter to guide him around Shanghai (partly because he has food allergies so he has to be careful), so she took us to this restaurant that travelers almost never go to (i.e. food the actual local people eat) and ordered a variety of dishes for us to try.

etiphany, you will be proud of me for eating this very authentic food (and once you see what it was, you will know it was very "authentic"). The dinner included chicken necks, frog, pig skin w/cauliflower, pig's blood soup (with liver and other unidentified things in it, I just tasted the broth of that one), snake, vegetables, lotus root, mushroom soup, some kind of chicken thing, Yangtze river fish, and some kind of fried rice cake type thing. They brought out a live frog to show us because the translator had trouble explaining what it was. Also, there were these weird things in the pig's blood soup that looked like capers, they were little berry-type things, but when you chew them your mouth gets all weird and tingly and your tongue feels fuzzy and it feels like some kind of anesthetic. Still have no idea what those were (the other people forced me to eat one, it was bizarre in a bad way).

And, etiphany will also be amused to note this, we went to The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. What is up with this chain? It's all over LA and all over Singapore (and apparently in China too) but it doesn't exist in most of the US.

In any case, now I have eaten a variety of things I would never have ordered on my own. I feel like I should be winning on Fear Factor or something ;)