The Pizza Cone

                                Celia and I were out on 平江路 (Ping Jiang Lu) the other day and both had a bit of a belly rumble. We walked down a little side alley and stumbled upon a little shop that sold snacks of various varieties, but what really caught our eye was something that looked a little like a savoury ice cream. We’d seen pictures of these things before, but had never had suitable appetites to try them. Well this time the fortunes of appetite had smiled upon us and we went ahead and ordered one each, I got a ham one and Celia got a chicken one. We both bit into them and were not disappointed, a flood of cheese filled our mouths, followed by a more than adequate seam of hot pizza topping. The cone wasn’t really a pizza as such, just sort of thin bread, but the filling was actually really good, not Italian pizzeria good, but for being a 15 kuai Chinese street snack it was pretty delicious. Something I like about ham in China is that it’s called 火腿 (huo tui), or fire leg-so essentially baked leg. I always find the Chinese language pleasingly elegant in this way, it often gives very literal translations that sound quite amusing in English. Some of my favourites are: 电脑 (dian nao-electronic brain-computer), 电梯 (dian ti-electronic ladder-lift/elevator), 手机 (shou ji-hand machine-mobile phone) and 火车 (huo che-fire vehicle-I’ll leave this to you to work out, but suffice it to say Fred Dibnah would have liked this particular piece of etymology). Anyway, following my mildly Joycian mental diversion I decided I was still hungry and went and got a more typically Chinese pancake with egg, vegetable, pickley sauce and chilli. Delicious and the equivalent of about 50p. I highly recommend all the different kind of pancakes you can get on the street here, they are all tasty, delivering varying degrees of mouth-watering succulence. More on that later, thanks for reading and for heaven’s sake pressure your local culture to introduce pizza cones into its edible vernacular.