But DengFeng offered far more than video stores. They had a night market which was quite fascinating.
It's all basically the same food, from one mobile stand to the next. Noodles, in different shapes, all pressed and boiled to order. Chicken, deep fried or roasted, and with meat on them. A nice departure from the typical Chinese chicken dish, where they take a chicken, pluck the feathers, disembowel it, and chop it up whole, into little pieces, to be cooked in a wok. You have to find the meat somewhere in the mess of grizzle, skin, cartilage, and bones. But here, they had real chickens. Whole chickens. Identifiable chickens. Chickens with meat on them. Well, mostly on the legs. One thing that I've noticed is that the chicken breasts are not very large, actually, they are quite nonexistent. A tribute to the chicken farmers not using hormones in their feed? The farmers are not feeding the chickens at all? Or is it something in the water? (It's a horrible condition not limited to just one species, seen mostly throughout the country).
There are lamb master wanna-be's up and down the street, with tables and little chairs set up on one side, and the food carts on the other. The street is shut down at 1830 hours to automobile traffic, but for some reason, it doesn't really stop them. You sit on one of these chairs, and order your food, amidst the roar of the occasional two cylinder Chinese motorcycle, taxi, pedestrians, and beggars. Women with guitar like things walk up and down, offering to sing you Chinese tunes while you eat. Cow stomach, and other various nefarious food items can be had. But I didn't see any deep friend scorpions or other bugs as I had in Beijing. I guess that these people just do not know how to eat well.
DengFeng is your typical small Chinese city. It has a post office (which does not offer international shipping), various types of restaurants, stores, and one auditorium. Hair dressing places abound here, which Yong assures me are just fronts for houses of prostitution. I didn't believe him, so I told him that we were going to go into a few of them, to get our hair cut. He didn't think I would get away with that ruse, so we never did it.
Collecting the trash in DengFeng. Big mechanized trash collecting trucks? Nah. One guy with a cart that he pulls by hand. And he's responsible for keeping the street clean also.