A little knowledge

She was selling what looked like black pudding from a frying pan at the side of the cobbled street in Lijiang's 'Old Town'. Could it possible be?

"What is that?" I asked in Chinese.

"It's a delicate mixture of pork fat and oatmeal blended with goat blood and a little of the local liqueur which is then roasted over a log fire and smoked for three weeks in a hut on the western side of the Snow Mountain", she replied in the local Naxi dialect...

No, of course not! Who knows what the hell she said? But it illustrates the frustration of knowing a tiny little bit of Mandarin which is rendered completely useless when people actually reply to you.

The black pudding was delicious though.