If Gansu is China’s wild west- barren, dry, sparsely populated- then Qinghuangdao, the first stop on our northeastern sampling trip, is the foggy, crowded, cosmopolitan east. After 2 weeks of eating nothing but noodles and dumplings, dodging goats and chickens in demolished, garbage-filled lots, and finding barn swallows by going door-to-door in ramshackle old neighborhoods, the humid sea breezes, skyscrapers, and seafood of coastal Qinghuangdao were a welcome change. It certainly helped that within an hour of arriving we found a huge outdoor market with a surrounding neighborhood just teeming with barn swallows.
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