el supermercado

The title of this post is in reference to the fact that, given my lack of Chinese, I find myself trying to speak broken Spanish to everyone here. I guess it's my default travel language in the Western world, but honestly, explaining to a Chinese fruit vendor that yo quiero seis manzanas por favor is about as useful as speaking in haiku. Good thing I can always resort to my other tried-and-true technique: sign language and a smile. Good thing I have no shame- or at least, not anymore. Here are some pics of the neighborhood market on my fancy new camera, which I (again, shamelessly) wear slung around my neck at all hours of the day. (Edit: I'm far too lazy to wait for this spotty, stolen internet to upload all my pics, but sooner or later I'll have a Shutterfly account for anyone interested in my amateurish attempts at photogrpahy)

The picture below is my favorite of the market, where we shop every day for fruits and vegetables, some familiar, some exotic: waxberries and leechees, mangoes and bananas, eggplants and chinese cabbage and the most delicious peas I've ever tasted. In China, everything is fresh- sometimes, alarmingly so. I was startled to walk through the beautiful market of colorful produce to find buckets of live snakes, rows of hanging ducks, live chickens stuffed into cages, pools of live fish, and buckets of live prawns, squirming insidiously inside a giant orange vat. So much for preferring my food without a face!

Notice the people snoozing in the background--napping is the norm here, a cultural rite I wish we could export to America, where no one stops for even a second, let alone in the middle of the day. The Chinese people have made an art form of napping in the most boisterous of circumstances is impressive: on crowded buses, in the middle of meetings, or even in wheelbarrows in the middle the street. (Here's where a picture could speak a thousand words if my internet didn't suck)