While the chief thing to do in this city seems to be to get out, there is still a nightlife of sorts, as well as a street food Zhuhai scene, but just how good is it? Well the jury’s still out on that one.
For the uninitiated Zhuhai is a city in Guangdong that is on the Pearl River Delta, but at just 2.5 million people is almost a village by local standards. The main reason to come here is to cross the border into Macau.
To do this most people seem to spend at least one night here, seemingly for the most part at Zhuhai Port.
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Street Food Zhuhai Port
Conveniently Zhuhai Trina station is quite literally opposite from Zhuhai Port, the gateway to Macao. Macao of course is a place that exists somewhere between being part of China and an independent state, with us at YPT certainly counting it as a country.
To read about counting countries click here.
The area between the train station and Macao is actually really cool with numerous hotels of all price ranges and restaurants galore selling for the most part Guangdong cuisine.
These were all open pretty late, well at least until 12, but was lacking bit on the down and dirty street food Zhuhai scene. I had some rice sand bbq duck here for lunch that was fairly decent.
There is also a pretty epic food court at the mall that connects the border crossing.
Seafood Street Zhuhai
Yet while it was a little disappointing at the port nothing could prepare me for what would happen at Seafood Street Zhuhai. So, we tried to go here at 10.30, but the hordes of people made a taxi all but impossible. And when I finally got one traffic meant not arriving until 11.30
On arrival it was obvious shops were closing, but we still tried. Interestingly there were seafood sellers selling, well seafood, but the deal was you go in the restaurant to get it cooked. I purchased squid and cuttle fish, but the restaurants were all closing and refused to cook. Eventually we got a refund, but I cannot think of another p-lace in China, or even Asia who would have refused business in such a fashion.
I did though like the model with it reminded me somewhat of Rason Market in North Korea.
Street Food Zhuhai and the weird nightlife
My main reason for going out though had been for me to watch England play football, but this would provide pretty hard to do, as in and as I have mentioned in another article there expats have left China. For whatever reason this has meant bars either closing, or changing to be more Chinese, such as Heaven Supermarket.
This led to an almost quest like affair that led me to street watching football, rather than street food. I did though get to sit outside watching the game and drinking Rio.
The area we were in though as in much of Zhuhai had a bunch of seafood restaurants that were open to the wee small hours, with me finding one tat was saving raw shrimp and the like at 3 am. I duly ate lots of raw fish and drank beer, with the combo, perhaps with my medicine leading to the shits 4th next day. I would not hold this against Zhuhai Street Food though, with me taking more umbrage with its lackluster nightlife (link).