Forbidden Food

Today I had two adventures, one with the Forbidden City and one with food. 

I will begin with the Forbidden City. 

 The thing about the Forbidden City is that it never ends. If you want to take a trip to the Forbidden City, leave first thing in the morning and plan to stay until closing time. We didn't, which means that we spent 3 1/2 hours there and didn't even get halfway through. 

There were a lot of huge, pointy buildings and different courtyards.

In the middle of it, we got to went to a really cool hall of clocks. Guess what they had there? THAT'S RIGHT--REALLY SWEET CLOCKS

After the clocks, it was time to go back. It was also roughly 4,000 million thousand degrees outside (meaning that I smelled like a month-old jackfruit) and there were some drinks for sale that looked like ice-cold sweet tea. (This is where the food adventures begin) 

Me: "Ni hao." *points at drink* "What is it?"

Saleslady: "LotsofconfusingChinesewordsandhandgestureforten."

Me: "Ok...I think I have ten..." 

I piad ten yuan. It did NOT taste like tea. It DID taste like barbecue sauce.

Later, I found out it was plum juice. What???

Then we ate dinner. Dinner was dumpling soup--harmless enough. UNTIL I FOUND THESE. 

Yes, it looks like mealworms. 

It's actually shrimp. 

And they were looking at me. 

After dinner, we went out for "ice cream". 

I'm renaming it "oreo-and-milk-slushie". Mmmmmm....not really. 

So, my new lesson is to go with the flow of food...but learn some Chinese symbols for different kinds of food and maybe stir all of my soup up to see what's in it before I put it in my mouth and find wormy shrimp stuck in my teeth.