Sunday: the market

This morning Nick left for his trip to give a lecture at Mianyang University, and I was sitting on the porch reading Edna Ferber’s Ice Palace when Cun Ayi approached me and said something which indicated she wanted me to go with her. So, I grabbed my purse and off we went, me in flip-flops and her in her sun hat.

After 10 minutes and a shortcut out of university housing, we ended up at the Sunday morning market. I had not yet seen a market of this caliber; it has everything you need. Close to the entrance were the many xigua (watermelon) vendors, as it is the season. Further along were many onions, and many many gourds of various sorts, some of which I have only briefly seen in the U.S. There were lots of plums and peaches, some shirts-and-capris stores (popular fashion), and the odd hair salon stall. One man had a great shoe soling shop complete with specialty sewing machine. Cun Ayi bought some onions when she found a good price, and then we moved on to a section that opened up wide, with a concrete floor: the meat market.

I was a little surprised at first, but there were many interesting characteristics of note. The first is that none of the meat is refrigerated. Each vendor (mostly pork) hangs their sides from meat hooks above a counter made out of wood, stone, or concrete. If you want one, you ask how much per jin (half kg), then you bargain down to what you think it’s worth. They then remove the meat and stick it in their scale, which is a long stick with a basket on one end and a weight on the other. There’s a handle in the middle, and when you slide the weight down the stick such that the moments are balanced from your product, they read you the weight and ta-da! give you the total price.

Side note on the scales: all vendors have a similar scale. Some are smaller for goods bought in smaller quantities, and some are bigger, like for meat products. They have probably been using these same scales (even before SI units of measure were around) for thousands of years. You could mark any weight scale along the stick, and use it until you basically whittle away the stick from sliding the weight so much. Very few vendors have digital scales, and it’s probably not worth it to buy one because of the maintenance.

After you pick out your pork, you can choose to have it ground up for you, which involves the meat being put in one of two mystery holes on top of a metal box, and then it comes out the front into a plastic baggie after lots of whirring and banging from the box. Actually it seemed like a safe process (i.e. still has bacteria that must be cooked out, but no foreign objects).

Another interesting part of the market is the homey atmosphere. Each booth is a family affair, complete with a kettle on top of a cylindrical oven-thing which is bolted to the ground outside of each stall. They use coal pellets that look like big hockey pucks, and those keep this little oven warm the whole day while the family uses the water for tea, cooking, and miscellaneous washing of hands or products. Don’t stand too close to them because you’ll breathe in the coal fumes and cough for 10 minutes.

Tonight our host sister Wei brought home a kitten from the market. Now, there are always puppies or something for sale in the markets, but we were told specifically not to touch them, because the can harbor all sorts of diseases including rabies. We need one more shot to complete the rabies series, which will happen Tuesday. Anyhow, when she was showing me, I could tell the cat was infested with something – lots of black little crawlies on the white fur. However, she really impressed me by then taking the tiny kitten into the bathroom and washing it for an hour, painstaking removing each flea by hand and drowning it in a basin of water. The kitten was not at all happy and mewed and clawed the whole time, but before dinner, every flea was gone, and the kitten even drank some milk. I don’t think I’ll handle it too much, but it is cute. Now, if only the chihuahua could stop barking at it, we’d all get some sleep …