why are chinatowns always so friggin full of way too many people & way too many weird smells & general batshit insanity? you might have a chinatown in your city, but i can't see how it could possibly hold a candle to the craziness of nyc's. of course, this assumes that i have no readers in shanghai & that the chinese government would block my blog anyhow.
for those of you who have never been to nyc's version, let me attempt to break down how chinatown works here:
the main street through chinatown is canal st, which runs from the holland tunnel on the west side to the manhattan bridge on the east side. back in the day, it actually was a canal, built to drain a disease-ridden pond into the hudson river. the area near the pond eventually became five points (the area made famous in gangs of new york).
nowadays, canal st is a major commercial way & the sidewalks are filled with tons of chinese people & tables with jewelry & blankets with bootleg dvds & copious bags of trash & slack-jawed tourists walking through it all in a daze, oblivious to the fact that their slack-jawedness inconveniences the other 300 people within the 10 foot radius around them, as those other people are usually trying to walk to other places.
the platforms at the canal st subway station are often scary places packed with so many people that you get the feeling that you (or a slack-jawed tourist) could very easily get bumped onto the tracks & into the path of an incoming train. boarding a rush hour q train here is often as close as you can get to a japan subway-style crush.
throughout chinatown, there's a lot of the same. TOO MANY DAMN PEOPLE! AND BOOTLEGS! AND BINS WITH WEIRD FLOPPING FISH! AND SKINNED CHICKENS IN THE WINDOWS OF PLACES! i don't mind the last three things as much the first.
#77 - chinatown.
snack: walky walky chocolate creme covered pretzel bits
drink: foco dragon fruit juice drink
on saturday, i met up with my brother at hong kong supermarket (in chinatown) & picked up a bunch of stuff, including but not limited to prawn crackers, rock candy that comes in pieces so big a hammer is required & a tag team of dumplings and dumpling sauce.
today, i dug into my chinatown booty. for a snack, i'm having walky walky chocolate creme covered pretzel bits. they're a japanese product & as you can see from the photo above, the packaging is awesome & coffee cup shaped. the bits look a bit like rabbit turds, but they have a nice dark chocolatey smell & the lid of the package flips open like a portable coffee cup, allowing you to drink them as if they were willy wonka's loveable nerds...sort of like a bunch of pieces of chocolate pocky. definitely tasty.
i'm having a foco dragon fruit juice drink, made in thailand, along with the rabbit turds. when i first poured it into a glass, i was definitely a bit frightened, as white chunks & pulp & black seeds of dragonfruit fell into my glass & floated around for a while before settling on the bottom. i'm glad the chunkiness has settled, because that means i don't have it sliming its way into my mouth as i try to enjoy the fruity dragonfruit taste.
in conclusion, the chinese grocery store has lots of weird, scary-looking junk, but some of it actually tastes good...i gotta be honest though...i can't finish this dragonfruit drink. those chunks have officially skeeved me out. sorry, thailand. i don't prefer feeling like somebody forgot to strain my drink.