Unique eats around the world-China

    Different places around the world have different types of food , but some of those dishes are a bit unique or exotic to some of us, however to them, it's a delicacy.  Some of the unique dishes around the world has been around for more than a century or even longer than that.  I personally have tried a few of those unique foods before, but they were not as exotic as the ones that I've seen on Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmerman.  I don't know how anyone could eat some of the things he ate on his trip around the world.  On one of his trips, he went to China and explored some of the different types of food there.  Some foods are not so strange, others, are quite strange, but to them, it's food. It kind of amazed me of all the different types of food that were eaten in China, from imperial dishes to street foods and other foods that the Chinese believed would help your body become healthy. 
    The first time when my parents went to Beijing, they told me all these stories about how different Chinese food was in China compared the Chinese food in America.  The Chinese food that you get at restaurants are Americanized Chinese food, you won't find those in any of the places in China.  In Beijing, there's food courts, street vendors and restaurants almost everywhere you go.  You can buy grasshoppers, crickets, maggots, any bug you can think of on a skewers to raw sea urchins.  I've never tried bugs or raw sea urchins before but I heard from the people who have tried it, that the bugs are very crunchy, poky in your mouth and you can almost taste what the bugs ate before you ate them.  Sea urchins on the other hand taste like the sea, you just know that it came from the ocean, it's rather fishy, most people either like it or hate it.  Depending on the freshness of the Sea urchin, it should taste rather creamy sweet.
     In the city, you can find a few imperial restaurants,   imperial restaurants serve dishes that were previously served to emperors during the centuries.  The recipes for those dishes have been preserved and kept through generation after generation and now normal citizens can try the imperial dishes.  The appearance of the dishes are just way to beautiful, it just makes you not want to eat because of how beautiful it is.  When dining in and imperial restaurant, there's a huge round table and a big lazy Susan in the middle, the food is placed on the lazy Susan, so that guests could just spin to the dish they want instead of reaching for the food.  The décor of the restaurant definitely makes you feel like royalty and the dishes are different from what you might find from the streets in Beijing.  
     Whether it's in the streets of Beijing or at the fanciest restaurants, you can find unique foods everywhere.