Fill Your Belly and Fix Up Your Sole

On ambitious post-work afternoons, we try to tour the town of Weifang to see what delectable offerings we can find. On a now not-so-recent adventure, (yes, the blog has been neglected for the past three weeks due to actually having to work a lot), we found an amazing street market behind one of our apartment buildings… both dangerously close to my apartment building as well. As most of you probably know, or would have guessed, I do love a street market. There is just so much to love at a street market. This one is no exception: pick-up trucks teeming with produce, tarps covered with neat lines and piles of seemingly haphazardly selected products, bicycles laden with goods, even bicycles laden with goods in the process of being cooked, people slurping up noodles while perched on stools, and streams of people who are apparently just walking or riding through the alleyway en route to somewhere else.

I am not sure exactly what everything is called. This lady has several varieties of what I would call Chinese flatbread or pizza... but, there is no cheese. Basically, it's a very oily dough fried up with onions and garlic and maybe some tomatoes inside or on top. All I know is that it's sold by weight- and it's delicious.

Steamed dumplings are always a sure bet- even if you’d never be sure enough to bet on their contents. Most of the time they have some sort of pork in them, a lot of garlic, and if you ask for no meat, vegetables. One of my favourite things about the dumplings is that they are cooked in towers of bamboo baskets. It just has awesome aesthetic value. And they are tasty. And addictive. And serving sizes are enormous. To be fair, serving sizes are enormous for everything. I see it as a challenge.

This guy fries up a wok of wonder when you select all the ingredients. It’s situations like these where I can’t help but think of how much of a roaring success this would be back in Jianada. 

Same deal with this guy. He just shows a little more muscle. 

 

Let’s talk about the deep-fried. I think I love deep-fried as much as I love street markets. Magic happens when they are combined. At this table, you can take a look at the deep-fried items and buy them by weight (of product, not body-mass gained). The obvious choice is calamari and the famed Weifang radish ball. Then, she scoops them up and hands them over to her husband (I assume) and he drops them into that boiling vat of oil. No one can argue with fresh double-deep fried calamari. The red things in the picture are swirling fly swatters. Gotta keep the flies outta the fried. I appreciate this health measure.

Of course I was going camera crazy. I appreciate that this guy reciprocated. It’s not every day you see a giant white woman, with a giant white camera, eating a giant pile of calamari. Fair is fair.

 The street market is where you find the skills, like the skill of a man who has clearly been pulling noodles for several years. He has a mound of dough that he pulls a ball from, and minutes later, faster than your eyes can even keep track- he’s dropped the perfectly uniform and excessively long noodles into a boiling pot of water. He pulls the noodles and his wife cooks them up and serves you a steamy bowl for 4 RMB. You can sit at their shin-level tables on a rickety stool to really soak in the flavour of the food and environment.

 To really top off the experience, we encountered a shoe repair guy on our way out. Obviously my Birkenstocks have been around the bend a few times. And just days before I was lamenting their almost completely worn through heel (yes, one side only-  I walk funny), so when in Rome… I sat right down on the stool and waited while he cut a new piece of rubber for the sole. The whole process took a few minutes in part because they had to gawk at my foot size first- but I did leave with a repaired Birky for all of 3 RMB! He quoted two, but I decided to tip. This was about 5 weeks ago and the repair job is holding up. I think I paid 2 RMB for another 3 years of Birkenstock bliss. Between that and the calamari, the street market treats me well.

I haven’t tried all the foods at this street market… yet. You have to work up the courage to really just dive in. Because honestly, you never know. And, unfortunately, I am not at the point in my Chinese language development where I can understand the explanation.  At least I know where to fatten up and reinforce my soles.