Tuesday 25 August 2009

Back in Lhasa: Street food and Yak Jerky

After the long journey out to Yangpanchen, we are now back at Lhasa. We are on our way for dinner when I saw an alley with fruit mongers selling their fresh produce to passerby. We had our dinner at a Chinese restaurant around the vicinity. It was a crazy dinner because the place was packed with noisy, Chinese tourists and the waitresses literally dropped the dishes on the tables as though the place is some mess house for hungry prisoners.

I didn't have much appetite now that we've been having a lot of vegetables dishes on all three meals each day. Outside the restaurants, there were Tibetans selling souveniers and handicrafts. I bought a few small jewelery boxes.

We were transferred back to the hotel after dinner. It was about eight o'clock and it still felt like day. Tibet had their time zone fixed with China's despite its location being in the west of China. We walked along the street and spotted some delicious street food which passerby were ordering. After much discussion, we decided to have some even though we were still full from dinner. It was funny because we didn't quite know how to make the order. So, finally, we got the idea. We went to the fridge, picked out the skewers we liked and passed it over to the cook. The cook would then fry and grilled them before adding spices to the cooked items. They looked delicious and oily. Hahaha! We had lotus, egg plant, some chicken, beef and crab sticks.

Next, we met some of the Singaporean tourists who were in our tour group and they were heading to the yak jerky shop. We followed and bought ourselves enough for our friends at home. I saw these long dried things hanging by the wall and they turned out to be dried yak penises! These were said to be good for men when brew in tonic.


Fruit vendors with their fresh produce


Man with colourful jacket


Skewers on the grill


Skewers just out of the frying wok


And this is the shop that sells them delicious skewers


Yak jerky of all flavours; 5 spice, sate, original, etc




Dried yak penises

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

longest penis ever!

rabbit said...

I could hardly believe it's yak penis. Mum asked several times to get confirmation from the Tibetan lady. 0_o