Culinaria China!

I suddenly realize that I haven’t mentioned anything about the food. Normally this is one of the biggest issues on a holiday, if you like the food or not. If you just can’t get any of the strange dishes through your throat, it is a bad experience and can ruin any holiday.
Well, neither me nor Catriona can be put into the box of fuzzy eaters, I eat nearly everything and I’m also very open and curious about food, and have been living in Hong Kong now for more than two years, has added some stuff to my “have been eaten” list, things that I didn’t know that I’d like.
If you are very curious about trying everything possible, Mainland China is then one of the right places to go, as here is nearly everything on the menu, if not everything.
In China there is food everywhere. In the restaurants and in all the eating-places as in small stalls along the street, where you just pick up something as you go, food. These small places are where you really can find the odd stuff like grilled scorpions, cocoons, bugs and snakes and whatever that move.
We were looking at all this, but didn’t try it; there must be a limit for curiosity.
But anyway, our general opinion on the food we ate there, must be somewhere in the upper part of the scale for good food.
I’ve traveled some countries so far, all with some amazing food, but I think never with food as good and varied like the food we got in China.
Like I said, there is food and eating-places everywhere, and at lunch- and dinner-time, these are always stuffed with people of all ages and parts of society, gathering together to enjoy 7 or 8 different dishes. The Chinese people love food, and they love it fresh and freshly made. Sometimes the eating-places didn’t have a menu, instead they took you to a kind of storage room looking like the food department of a small grocery, and then they asked you to pick out what you wanted to eat. Well they had no pigs, cows or chickens running around there, but the fish was still swimming around in fish tanks, and all kinds of vegetables fresh in boxes.
We for sure ate a lot, but mainly because the western kind of going to a restaurant, where everybody orders just the plate or dish they want, isn’t common in China; they order 5 to 8 different thing and then they share, pick a bit here and there. We kind of knew this, but got surprised by the sizes of the dishes we ordered. They were huge and mostly we couldn’t even finish it all up. Anyway, mostly we didn’t pay more than around 80 Yuan, including the two beers, for a meal. If I didn't mention this before, then 10 Yuan is around 1 Euro.