Food Trucks, Chinese Style

Street food is extremely popular in Xiamen, and most of it is sold from bikes or scooters. I keep discovering new one-wheel food carts  ingeniously attached to bikes. This smattering of images doesn't even scratch the surface of what's available. I took all the pictures within a mile of our apartment. Vendors who sell snacks for school children park right on my street corner every day. Next to the big shopping mall, there are around 40 food vendors with their bikes and carts smashed one against the other. Some of their dishes look super tasty, but there are also peculiar smells that I haven't yet warmed up to. When walking past one or two of the carts, I have to remember to hold my breath, but I have no idea what the offending smell is! Some agree to have their picture taken and some don't, but all are very smiling and friendly to non-Chinese speaking me!

This is probably the simplest setup  I've seen: a very basic bicycle with a block of styrofoam holding sticks of glazed meat. All this balanced on the handlebars! Bikes like this are very, very common, and they do a great business.

Children beg moms to buy them this treat! It looks like a stack of mini candied apples on a stick, but I'm pretty sure it's little meat balls covered in some kind of red glaze. True confessions: I haven't tasted it yet, and it may never happen.

  

Here's a bike with a side cart sporting a barbeque! He's grilling little pork kebobs of some type, served with a little sauce. There are red-hot coals in his metal fire box. Business is good for this guy; he sells almost as quickly as he can cook. The girl in the background seems to be enjoying. I'm not sure what his cart looks like when he packs up to bike home.

This woman also has a bicycle with an attached one-wheel cart. She is parked on a quiet road close to the beach and adjoining park, and she's selling pineapple on a stick! The way she holds the pineapple in her hand and uses a Chinese chefs knife to peel and score it is quite impressive.

Although I saw several groups people walking down the street eating this treat after visiting the park,  I was a little leery of buying pineapple that had been peeled and scored on the street, then rinsed in a bucket of water. As a thank you for letting me take pictures,  I did purchase a couple of the unpeeled pineapples which we added to our breakfast fruit salad:)

In addition to tasty snacks, fruit is often sold on the streets. There are some vehicles that I think would actually classify as trucks, but most vendors sell from scooters with an umbrella. Out of an abundance of caution, we usually buy fruit from large grocery stores rather than on the street, but what they have to offer almost always looks good!
I guess you could call the scooter selling snacks to school children on my street a Chinese version of a McDrive. The little delicacies closely resemble an egg McMuffin! The piping hot pan looks like a round, shallow muffin tin. To start, the guy gives every indentation a good shot of oil, then pours batter into some and cracks an egg into others. When the batter part gets crispy he flips it, and he adds something that looks like ham to the eggs.  He stacks them high every afternoon, waiting for the school bell to ring. I'm not sure if they are sold or what happens. I wanted to buy one just to be polite after taking so many pictures, but he pointed to the school to let me know that they weren't for me!

Another one of my favorites are the sugar cane scooters!  They take the long stalks of sugar cane and shuck off the husk on the sidewalk. Then they cut the cane into lengths about a yard long and run them through a press to extract the juice. The pressed cane comes out one side, and the juice falls into a container. From there it's poured into bottles or glasses for immediate consumption.

 Maybe by the end of November I'll be brave enough to start enjoying some of this... For right now, I'm just thankful every day that all three of us have been blessed with amazingly good health!