Shopping Carts and Chicken Hearts

Good evening from Beijing! It was another beautiful day in nation's capital, and although I would have liked to have just layed outside all day, things had to get done - most importantly grocery shopping. Doctor Tseng, Zhu Xi (Juicy), and I first started at the Merry Food Mart. Don't be fooled by it's name. The Merry Food Mart is a colossal conglomerate of clothing, kitchen ware, and grocery store spanning five floors. The store is equipped with moving walkways that run on a horizonal incline to make travelling between the floors with shopping carts much easier. And from the moment you get your trolley, you are bombarded with advertisements. Each cart has a TV screen attached to it that shows which items are on sale, and every few minutes a commercial will blare from the screen telling you to buy anything from cat food to vinegar. That, however, is just a small preview of what awaits inside the store. Standing at nearly every display in the grocery store is an employee equipped with a Madonna-esque microphone connected to a hand held speaker. It is their job to attract customers to certain items by, quite litterally, screaming prices and buy one get one deals at the shoppers going past. It is so noisy that you have to almost shout to talk to someone. For someone like me, who doesn't care much for noisy places, Merry Food Mary is my personal Hell. After leaving Merry Hell Mary, we went to a much smaller store specializing in baked items. There wasn't any place to park on the street, so naturally we turned the corner, jumped the curve, and drove up the side walk until we were right outside the store's door. Convenience is like rice, it's very important to the Chinese way of life. Finally we went to the last store of the day, an open air flea market where we bought fresh Chinese fruit. When we returned home, it was time for the Tseng family to once again play teach the foreigner. Now I'm all about trying new foods, but I was a bit weary to eat the fruit, because (and once again I must stress how adament I am about this) I really didn't want to have painful diarrhoea. But, I let polietness and the thrill of expanding my culinary knowledge get the better of me, and I ate the fruit. Never before have I eaten such delicious and refreshing fruit. If I expell my innards later because of it, it will totally be worth it. After returning from food heaven, it was time for dinner. We went out to a local place run by Muslims from the Shanjiang province in Northwest China. They specialize in a kabab-like style eatting, and the selection was quite tasty. My favorite dish was a very thin and tender meat that was just about the most flavorful thing I have ever tasted. My host mom asked if I knew what kind of meat it was. I told her I didn't, but that I thought it was chicken. She smiled, took a kabab herself, and said, "You're right. It's chicken hearts. Very delicious." Bite. There went my appetite.