Latest / bit of a Rambler / 085 Chinese Wet Markets

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085 Chinese Wet Markets · bit of a Rambler

0:00
Speaker 1: Hello. My name is Kai, and I am a bit
0:03
Speaker 1: of a rambler. I like to travel, learn and tell stories,
0:07
Speaker 1: and today I wanted to talk about wet markets if
0:10
Speaker 1: you're unfamiliar with them. They're similar to a farmer's market,
0:14
Speaker 1: but a little more permanent. You can go every day.
0:17
Speaker 1: There's usually a roof, but it's open air. The ground
0:21
Speaker 1: is just the ground. I used to go to one
0:23
Speaker 1: that was literally a wet market because it rained all
0:26
Speaker 1: the time and it was just mud all over the
0:29
Speaker 1: ground for months, like six months a year. But it's
0:33
Speaker 1: nice because you can always get the freshest meat and
0:35
Speaker 1: vegetables at those places because the people, the farmers are
0:39
Speaker 1: coming straight from their farms with the stuff there and
0:42
Speaker 1: they come every day. So wet markets are large, open
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Speaker 1: air markets where you can buy like fresh fruit and
0:50
Speaker 1: fresh meat and vegetables. So I'm going to dive into
0:53
Speaker 1: the Chinese wet markets because they had a conversation about
0:55
Speaker 1: them recently, and it's a pretty why adventure because other
1:02
Speaker 1: what markets I've been to in many other countries are
1:07
Speaker 1: nothing like the Guangdong, the Southern region wet market that
1:11
Speaker 1: I went to last year. And I went to wet
1:15
Speaker 1: markets in most of China for the whole time. I
1:19
Speaker 1: was there for years, and then I went to one
1:21
Speaker 1: in Guangdong and I was like.
1:22
Speaker 2: What these are real?
1:25
Speaker 1: So I like wet markets a lot. I usually did
1:27
Speaker 1: all of my shopping when I was living in Beijing
1:30
Speaker 1: and chung Dou. And Beijing is in the northeast of China,
1:34
Speaker 1: and then Chungdu is in just about the geographical center
1:38
Speaker 1: east of China, so they're both considered mainland China, and
1:43
Speaker 1: they're both Mandarin speaking, they're both not Guangdong the southern
1:47
Speaker 1: part of China. And I love those open air markets there.
1:51
Speaker 1: They have everything, all the food you could want, and
1:54
Speaker 1: it's so cheap. You can buy giant shopping bags. You
2:00
Speaker 1: could bring a backpack, fill the backpack completely up with
2:04
Speaker 1: food and spend.
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Speaker 2: Maybe five dollars. It's so cheap.
2:09
Speaker 1: And when I used to make my gienjiow the potstickers
2:15
Speaker 1: or dumplings, I would go down and buy a whole
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Speaker 1: bunch of vegetables and maybe meat, depending on what type
2:23
Speaker 1: of potsticker I wanted to make. And I don't think
2:25
Speaker 1: I ever spent more than five dollars on all of
2:29
Speaker 1: the fixings for over two hundred giangio every time I
2:34
Speaker 1: made them, over two hundred potstickers each time I made
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Speaker 1: a batch. Whoever, the local farmer is with bye tie
2:41
Speaker 1: cabbage that day he brings in the bye tie and
2:44
Speaker 1: you know it's fifty cents, and a cabbage is if
2:47
Speaker 1: you just made cabbage potstickers, that's like who knows, fifty
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Speaker 1: sixty pot stickers right there with one cabbage for fifty cents.
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Speaker 1: So yeah, it can be very affordable, very economical to
3:01
Speaker 1: go to these wet markets. They have great prices, and
3:04
Speaker 1: like I said, the produce is usually fresh, a lot
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Speaker 1: fresher and cheaper than you'll get in dry markets and
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Speaker 1: regular supermarkets that we're used to in the Western world. Also,
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Speaker 1: it's really fun because while a lot of this stuff
3:19
Speaker 1: is permanent, every wet market is different. There's not like, oh,
3:22
Speaker 1: there has to be a guy selling sewing stuff, and
3:25
Speaker 1: there has to be a guy selling poster board or whatever.
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Speaker 1: There are some dry goods around, but you just have
3:31
Speaker 1: to stop in at every wet market and see what
3:34
Speaker 1: that place provides. Like my favorite food in China is
3:39
Speaker 1: the beer fried roast duck. The pgo kaya and pretty
3:45
Speaker 1: common enough to find in Beijing, I can find it
3:47
Speaker 1: because I know what I'm looking for, but pretty rare
3:51
Speaker 1: in Chungdu and other parts of China. So when I
3:54
Speaker 1: move down to Chungdu, I had to sor I keep
3:57
Speaker 1: renouncing it wrong. It keeps throwing me off Chung Do.
4:01
Speaker 1: So in chung Dou, I looked around for Pgo Kaya,
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Speaker 1: and I went to a bunch of wet markets and
4:08
Speaker 1: couldn't find it. But I just kept going around. Every
4:10
Speaker 1: couple days I would discover a new one. Because there's
4:13
Speaker 1: no they're not on Google Maps most of the time.
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Speaker 1: They're just what the local farmers and local neighborhood people
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Speaker 1: get together to sell their goods in a small community.
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Speaker 1: So it's not yeah, it's it's not some official thing
4:27
Speaker 1: that's on Google Maps most of the time. But I
4:30
Speaker 1: was riding around my bicycle and I turned down some
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Speaker 1: alley and then it just exploded into life. There was
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Speaker 1: a giant wet market a few turns down this alley,
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Speaker 1: a big courtyard area in several alley's spiraling off, and
4:42
Speaker 1: at the end of one of the alleys there were
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Speaker 1: I mean they're long too, they can go on for
4:48
Speaker 1: a kilometer easily, but at the end of one of them,
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Speaker 1: there was a guy selling pgo kaya in a little
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Speaker 1: stall rather than a sand lunca, the three wheeled bike
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Speaker 1: they use. And I would not have expected to find
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Speaker 1: someone in a stall because I've never seen them selling
5:03
Speaker 1: an estall before. In Beijing. They all go around on
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Speaker 1: sand luncha well mostly actually I saw a couple, but
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Speaker 1: they don't look like handmade beer fried roast duck. They
5:14
Speaker 1: kind of look processed. But this guy's looked like he
5:18
Speaker 1: made them himself. The big jug of beer was right there,
5:22
Speaker 1: and the vat where he boiled the ducks and everything,
5:25
Speaker 1: and it was great. But that's what's so great about
5:27
Speaker 1: web markets. You can find what you're looking for as
5:31
Speaker 1: long as you just keep going to each one, because
5:33
Speaker 1: they all, like I said, have very different things. At
5:36
Speaker 1: one of them, they might be selling you know, those
5:38
Speaker 1: bugs that you can eat as a snack, crickets, although
5:42
Speaker 1: that's really not very common in the north. That'll pop
5:45
Speaker 1: up when I start talking about the Guangdong markets, the
5:48
Speaker 1: southern markets. But there will always be people baking stuff,
5:54
Speaker 1: and they'll be bakeries, they'll be eggs to buy. Like
5:56
Speaker 1: I said, all the produce, there's usually one home goods
5:58
Speaker 1: place where you can buy electric kettles or pots and pans,
6:03
Speaker 1: or chairs and tables. When I had to build my school,
6:07
Speaker 1: my office administrator wanted to order all of the furniture online,
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Speaker 1: all of the chairs and tables for the students. I
6:15
Speaker 1: think I bought the projector online, but pretty much everything
6:21
Speaker 1: we needed, I would just go to one of these
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Speaker 1: wet markets and buy the chairs because you can haggle,
6:27
Speaker 1: it's expected, and they have the best prices anyway, so
6:31
Speaker 1: you're already starting at a low price tag. And I
6:33
Speaker 1: got eight chairs for the students for a buck like
6:39
Speaker 1: maybe not that cheap, but pretty much nothing like five
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Speaker 1: dollars maybe for eight good chairs that were going to
6:46
Speaker 1: last years for the students. They also have full tables,
6:49
Speaker 1: so we got desks for the students. It's just very
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Speaker 1: convenient to have these home goods stores slightly set apart
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Speaker 1: from the other sections. And of course the home goods
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Speaker 1: are going to be in a dry air, and most
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Speaker 1: wet markets don't have the muddy floor like I talked about.
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Speaker 1: That was just one super local place I liked to
7:08
Speaker 1: go to, But nobody likes walking through months, so most
7:11
Speaker 1: of them are dry grounds, even though they call them
7:14
Speaker 1: wet markets. And if it is dry goods like furniture
7:17
Speaker 1: or cutlery or whatever, then that's set apart in a dry,
7:23
Speaker 1: hygienic environment.
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Speaker 2: Right next to.
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Speaker 1: The butcher and the deli and the vegetables and the bakery,
7:30
Speaker 1: there might be some guy selling yak jerkey, which if
7:32
Speaker 1: you listen to My Favorite Foods episodes, you know, is
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Speaker 1: like my favorite snack also, And like I said, each
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Speaker 1: different wet market has its own personality. It's just really
7:41
Speaker 1: fun going to them and seeing what each one has.
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Speaker 1: There might be some grandma sitting with her manual sewing
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Speaker 1: machine and you can ask her to repair or fix
7:51
Speaker 1: up anything that you need fixed sewing. It's just a
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Speaker 1: lot more alive than any store, any supermarket that you
8:00
Speaker 1: walk into because everybody is there. There's so many people,
8:04
Speaker 1: each person selling their thing. There's a honey guys selling honey,
8:09
Speaker 1: which I used all the time for mead the fresh
8:11
Speaker 1: fruit of course, also for my wines. So I love
8:15
Speaker 1: these wet markets. And sometimes there would just be a
8:19
Speaker 1: huge sign on the side of the road that said
8:21
Speaker 1: fung me and that means honey in Mandarin, and I
8:25
Speaker 1: would turn down and it wouldn't even be a wet market.
8:28
Speaker 1: That was just a guy selling He had his own personal,
8:33
Speaker 1: huge apiary with dozens of hives behind a wall next
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Speaker 1: to a road, like completely nondescript, except he painted the
8:42
Speaker 1: word fung me for honey on it. And then I
8:45
Speaker 1: turned in and yeah, you can buy literal like fifty
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Speaker 1: gallon drums of honey and he'll just scoop in a
8:52
Speaker 1: ladle and take out however much you want. I usually
8:54
Speaker 1: got a couple a couple scoops a couple pounds for
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Speaker 1: my honey wines that I'm made. Most wet markets, because
9:02
Speaker 1: they're run by real people living real lives, aren't open
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Speaker 1: all day. They open up pretty early morning, and then
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Speaker 1: by the afternoon everyone's going home or packing up in everything.
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Speaker 1: But you have a good eight hour window to buy
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Speaker 1: everything you need before everyone starts packing up to go
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Speaker 1: home for dinner. Exploring cities in China and discovering new
9:25
Speaker 1: wet markets is so much fun because you never know
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Speaker 1: what you're going to find, and there's always one somewhere
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Speaker 1: that you wouldn't expect it to be, Like I lived
9:34
Speaker 1: next to one for a year for longer, and I
9:38
Speaker 1: just didn't realize it was right next to me. Until
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Speaker 1: one day I went down a different street than I
9:42
Speaker 1: usually walked down, and there was a wet market in
9:45
Speaker 1: my neighborhood. Some of them do pop up in the evening, too,
9:48
Speaker 1: but they're more I guess that's more of a community market.
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Speaker 1: It doesn't feel, yeah, like there's no home good stores.
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Speaker 1: It's usually just like produce, like just the food that
9:57
Speaker 1: pops up in the evening. The people that don't have
10:00
Speaker 1: to go home for dinner maybe reconvene from other wet
10:03
Speaker 1: markets and form little neighborhood night markets near more popular
10:08
Speaker 1: or near more populated neighborhoods. Anyway, those are all the
10:14
Speaker 1: North wet markets, and I really I like them. I
10:17
Speaker 1: went to them, like I said, all the time. I
10:19
Speaker 1: always bought my meat from them. I just use them
10:21
Speaker 1: for everything. I use them to furnish my schools, to
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Speaker 1: get food for myself, to orient myself around the city,
10:31
Speaker 1: and just to familiarize myself with the culture and practice
10:34
Speaker 1: my Mandarin, which was terrible and in the beginning it
10:38
Speaker 1: was so difficult to buy anything. But I just kept
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Speaker 1: traveling to them, and everyone's always very kind, and you
10:44
Speaker 1: know they're trying to sell things, so they're always being
10:47
Speaker 1: very hospitable, and I practiced enough that I was That's
10:51
Speaker 1: one of the reasons I got comfortable speaking Mandarin so quickly,
10:54
Speaker 1: because I always went to these places, especially in Beijing,
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Speaker 1: where there are so many different accents, because everyone came
11:01
Speaker 1: from all over China to Beijing, where the best jobs
11:03
Speaker 1: are on the most money are. And if they're selling
11:06
Speaker 1: rojia moa, the traditional pulled pork sandwich from Xi'an, even
11:13
Speaker 1: if they're just selling it from a stall in a
11:15
Speaker 1: wet market, they want to do that in Beijing because
11:17
Speaker 1: they know there's more people there and there's more opportunities.
11:21
Speaker 1: But as much time as I spent at wet markets
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Speaker 1: in Beijing and chung Dou, I didn't spend any time
11:28
Speaker 1: in wet markets in the South. And I visited Hong
11:31
Speaker 1: Kong and I went to a couple markets, but Hong
11:34
Speaker 1: Kong is so built up that the wet markets feel
11:39
Speaker 1: more like a Western farmer's market than they do a
11:42
Speaker 1: Chinese wet market, some kind of open air market where
11:45
Speaker 1: anybody can come in with their stall and sell whatever
11:48
Speaker 1: they want to. So I finally visited Fushan, which is
11:52
Speaker 1: a very interesting town in Guangdong Fu Shan is Bruce
11:57
Speaker 1: Lee's ancestral home. It's where owng Chun Wing Chun comes from,
12:02
Speaker 1: which is one of the only practical Chinese martial arts,
12:05
Speaker 1: like you could use it in the real world, according
12:08
Speaker 1: to some martial arts judge book list I read once.
12:14
Speaker 1: As far as I understand, wing chun is one of
12:16
Speaker 1: the very few practical Chinese martial arts. But yeah, so
12:20
Speaker 1: it's pretty famous since Licia a Long Bruce Lee is
12:23
Speaker 1: from there, and I stayed in the place he was
12:26
Speaker 1: from Shunda, And one day a friend asked me to
12:30
Speaker 1: go with them to a market, and I like, what markets,
12:33
Speaker 1: And they were like, this one's big though, this one
12:34
Speaker 1: has everything, and I was like, okay, let's go, and
12:38
Speaker 1: I was. I drove my motor scooter with them, and
12:43
Speaker 1: when we got there, I was blown away just by
12:46
Speaker 1: the sheer size of it. The magnitude of this went
12:50
Speaker 1: market bowled me over and they were still setting up,
12:54
Speaker 1: so I didn't realize that they weren't finished setting up
12:58
Speaker 1: when I got there. Locks like easily a half kilometer radius,
13:04
Speaker 1: like a full one kilometer long market in a whole circle.
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Speaker 1: It had just taken over an entire neighborhood, this wet market,
13:11
Speaker 1: and it's famous in the town I was in because
13:14
Speaker 1: it's so huge and that's where everybody goes to sell
13:17
Speaker 1: their stuff. But I was already blown away, and over
13:21
Speaker 1: the two hours, maybe ninety minutes two hours that I
13:25
Speaker 1: was there, it just kept getting bigger and bigger, until
13:29
Speaker 1: by the time I left, if it was less than
13:32
Speaker 1: three kilometers diameter, just a circle of a wet market,
13:37
Speaker 1: I would be surprised because it was huge. Like I
13:42
Speaker 1: walked down one street, like the main street, even though
13:47
Speaker 1: there were streets going in every direction. The main street
13:51
Speaker 1: I walked down. I probably spent forty five minutes walking down,
13:56
Speaker 1: and I didn't quite get to the end. People selling
13:59
Speaker 1: tower and like I said, home goods, breakfast foods, lunch foods,
14:05
Speaker 1: every sort of Chinese snack. There are, every candy, there
14:09
Speaker 1: was jerky for me to buy. I tried some of that,
14:12
Speaker 1: just every It's kilometers of shops and trades people and
14:18
Speaker 1: crafts people. It was crazy how huge this wet market was.
14:24
Speaker 1: It was by far the largest wet market I've ever
14:26
Speaker 1: been to, and probably the largest one I'll ever go to.
14:29
Speaker 1: I don't even know if China has one larger than that.
14:32
Speaker 1: I'm sure there technically must be somewhere, but this was enormous.
14:38
Speaker 1: So that main street is for regular eating food, like
14:42
Speaker 1: ready made prepared food like the rojam oo I mentioned.
14:46
Speaker 1: You could get a sandwich, or you could get the
14:47
Speaker 1: genbing that folded egg omelet with vegetables and spices inside.
14:53
Speaker 1: That is like my favorite breakfast food ever. It's all
14:56
Speaker 1: like the simple stuff. There's balloons for the kids and
14:59
Speaker 1: toys and yeah, like I said, towels, I bought a
15:02
Speaker 1: towel there. That's why that's coming to mind. Lots of
15:05
Speaker 1: clothes racks are on that main street. It's kind of
15:08
Speaker 1: the dry market prepared section of the huge wet market
15:13
Speaker 1: open air market. So there's this more dry section and
15:17
Speaker 1: then there's the wet market section with all of the
15:19
Speaker 1: food and animals, and that also is gobsmacking. So they
15:26
Speaker 1: have everything everything. And there's a saying in China, and
15:32
Speaker 1: it's roughly in the north they pork, beef and chicken,
15:38
Speaker 1: and in the South they eat everything. And I had
15:41
Speaker 1: heard that in various forms over the years from my
15:44
Speaker 1: Chinese friends, that oh, if you go to the South,
15:46
Speaker 1: you'll have to eat bugs, and they sell crickets in
15:51
Speaker 1: some northern wet markets, and they sell crickets and lots
15:55
Speaker 1: of Thai markets, so that wasn't particularly shocking. So when
16:00
Speaker 1: I heard them saying, oh, Southern people eat everything, they
16:03
Speaker 1: sell everything in their wet markets, I was like, yeah, yeah, okay,
16:06
Speaker 1: because there are a lot of cultural sayings that people
16:09
Speaker 1: have about different provinces in China that Chinese people specifically
16:13
Speaker 1: have about different provinces, and they aren't really relevant a
16:17
Speaker 1: lot of the time or necessarily true all the time.
16:20
Speaker 1: They're just good ways to think about those places or
16:24
Speaker 1: easy ways to organize them in the Chinese cultural psyche.
16:29
Speaker 1: So when I heard, oh, they have so much food,
16:31
Speaker 1: I figured, like, you can get frog in the north
16:34
Speaker 1: of China, but maybe it's more popular in the south.
16:37
Speaker 1: And then I showed up to the wet market portion
16:40
Speaker 1: where they were selling all of the animals for whatever
16:44
Speaker 1: you want for them. Do you want a pet or
16:46
Speaker 1: do you want to eat them, that's up to you,
16:49
Speaker 1: And I was blown away, as in, oh, they do
16:54
Speaker 1: eat everything, and they do have everything. In Guangdong in
16:59
Speaker 1: the south of China, so they had beef, chicken, pork,
17:05
Speaker 1: and it was a little different because they did have
17:06
Speaker 1: full pigs skewered like right there in the market, and
17:11
Speaker 1: you could cut off what you wanted and order as
17:14
Speaker 1: much as you wanted in the different cuts and the
17:16
Speaker 1: different cooking techniques. They would make it all there for
17:19
Speaker 1: You could get che charon if you wanted, which I
17:22
Speaker 1: don't even know what the Chinese call chi chron because
17:25
Speaker 1: I don't really like cheechron very much. Chi charn is
17:29
Speaker 1: fried pork skin, very popular in a lot of countries,
17:33
Speaker 1: not as big in China, but it was there because
17:36
Speaker 1: that market had everything. And when you've got a whole
17:39
Speaker 1: pig on a skewer, you got to figure out what
17:41
Speaker 1: to do with every part of its body. And I
17:43
Speaker 1: was like, oh wow, yeah, look they really do have everything.
17:47
Speaker 1: And then I kept walking and I saw way, way, way, way,
17:50
Speaker 1: way more. Okay, and a quick insert here before I
17:54
Speaker 1: go on, and I tell you about all of the
17:56
Speaker 1: foods you didn't realize were foods that were sold at
17:59
Speaker 1: this wet market. You have to understand the history of China,
18:03
Speaker 1: just very very broad strokes. There was a great famine
18:07
Speaker 1: and tens of millions of people died under mau Zadong,
18:11
Speaker 1: not the least reason because he centralized all food to Beijing,
18:17
Speaker 1: which is at the extreme northeast of China of the country,
18:22
Speaker 1: and all the food was trucked away. Whatever grain you
18:27
Speaker 1: grew was trucked away to Beijing, and Beijing would decide
18:31
Speaker 1: how much of the rice you grew you got back,
18:35
Speaker 1: and sometimes he would decide you didn't get any back.
18:38
Speaker 1: So if you had a town of ten thousand people
18:40
Speaker 1: all growing rice, you could send away your yearly annual
18:43
Speaker 1: harvest and Beijing wouldn't send any back. And if you
18:47
Speaker 1: kept any behind for your own that wasn't allowed or authorized,
18:52
Speaker 1: you could be executed. So people didn't really keep things back.
18:55
Speaker 1: They didn't just give them that. Sometimes they would give
18:58
Speaker 1: them the iron farm equipment they used, because Beijing needed
19:02
Speaker 1: iron to build machines to join the industrial age under Malzadoon.
19:07
Speaker 1: So the southern part of the country gave everything, and
19:12
Speaker 1: I mean everything to the north. They had nothing left,
19:16
Speaker 1: and they had literally zero food a lot of the time.
19:19
Speaker 1: So when they started looking at well what can I eat,
19:22
Speaker 1: they ate everything in the province. Any possible edible food
19:28
Speaker 1: became fair game because there was literally nothing to eat
19:32
Speaker 1: for them. And like I said, tens of millions of
19:34
Speaker 1: Chinese people died in a couple decades, so they got
19:38
Speaker 1: used to eating everything, and everything became normal. Everything became
19:43
Speaker 1: prepared in one way. And that's the official story of
19:46
Speaker 1: why they have such a varied culinary world in the
19:53
Speaker 1: South even compared to the North of China. So when
19:56
Speaker 1: you hear about all these things they're selling for food,
19:58
Speaker 1: understand that those people that literally had no food and
20:02
Speaker 1: had to eat anything, some of those people are still alive.
20:07
Speaker 1: It ended in the seventies, the zero food in the
20:09
Speaker 1: south when Mao died in the late seventies. Seventy eight, no,
20:13
Speaker 1: seventy six. But up until that point, money, money, resources,
20:20
Speaker 1: and food were being trucked out at one hundred percent
20:23
Speaker 1: from the South to Beijing to make Beijing seem richer
20:27
Speaker 1: and to move forward into the industrial age. So some
20:31
Speaker 1: of those people who were teenagers in the seventies are
20:34
Speaker 1: still alive now and their tastes haven't changed. They're living
20:39
Speaker 1: in the same town they grew up in and their
20:42
Speaker 1: habits or their habits after growing up like that, So
20:45
Speaker 1: you have to understand that's where this culinary breadth of
20:50
Speaker 1: species comes from. That these people ate anything available, and boy,
20:56
Speaker 1: it was eye opening. Let's start slow. There were chickens,
21:04
Speaker 1: and there were thousands of chickens. I mean at least
21:10
Speaker 1: thousands of chickens, if not tens of thousands. There were
21:14
Speaker 1: thousands of ducks in these huge open air pens. Tanks
21:19
Speaker 1: of lobsters, giant crabs, like huge, huge crabs, conks, oysters
21:28
Speaker 1: the size of my chest, like giant clams, giant, bigger
21:34
Speaker 1: than my body, huge, literally like three and a half
21:38
Speaker 1: feet wide at the mouth. It was I didn't expect
21:42
Speaker 1: to see those there. And some of those people were
21:44
Speaker 1: selling pearls too. The oyster cellars or the clam cellars
21:47
Speaker 1: were selling pearls of varying sizes. And eels. They had
21:52
Speaker 1: tons of different kinds of eels, like whether the fins
21:55
Speaker 1: were only on the top, runs top and bottom, or
21:57
Speaker 1: one of their heads was bigger. They all separated them
22:00
Speaker 1: into which type of eel because people liked to buy
22:03
Speaker 1: different eels. And eels were something. Seafood was something really
22:07
Speaker 1: that is very uncommon in many wet markets. You'll find
22:12
Speaker 1: one fish guy sometimes in the north, but it's not
22:15
Speaker 1: very common. And these guys just I mean, with the
22:17
Speaker 1: conks and the clams and the eels I had never
22:21
Speaker 1: seen that in a wet market before. And this was
22:24
Speaker 1: this was not a couple old ones. These all looked
22:27
Speaker 1: like they came from the ocean twenty minutes ago. And
22:31
Speaker 1: they had thousands of them, not dozens or hundreds, but thousands.
22:39
Speaker 1: It was unbelievable. I couldn't believe the scope and scale
22:44
Speaker 1: of seafood.
22:46
Speaker 2: They had there.
22:48
Speaker 1: A lot of these animals were animals I have never
22:50
Speaker 1: seen before in my life, Like I know that I
22:53
Speaker 1: have been to aquariums and I've seen a giant clam
22:56
Speaker 1: once and that's the only time I've seen it. And
22:58
Speaker 1: here they just had them like kiddie pools and you
23:01
Speaker 1: could just buy one goldfish, tens of thousands, Like I said,
23:07
Speaker 1: the lobsters everything, They had everything. Every type of seafood
23:12
Speaker 1: I know of. There were sharks, Yes, there were sharks. Yeah,
23:16
Speaker 1: every type of seafood I know of was at this mark.
23:19
Speaker 1: At the seafood section of the wet market, which is huge.
23:23
Speaker 1: It's like a kilometer long just the seafood section, or
23:26
Speaker 1: maybe half a kilometer radius because seafood is really big.
23:30
Speaker 1: But there's also a lot of you know, there's a
23:33
Speaker 1: lot of land animals that take up even more space
23:35
Speaker 1: because they can't cram them in as closely as all
23:38
Speaker 1: the oily, squiggly sea monsters. A billion squid. I was
23:44
Speaker 1: trying to think of thousands or tens of thousands. There
23:47
Speaker 1: were a billion squid. There were so many squid, it
23:51
Speaker 1: was crazy. There were octopi. What are other sea animals?
23:55
Speaker 1: I can't even think, but there are.
23:57
Speaker 2: They were there. They were there.
23:59
Speaker 1: Being sold for consumption or just to own in your
24:02
Speaker 1: giant aquarium at home if you wanted to. But when
24:05
Speaker 1: people talked about, oh, Cantonese people eat everything, and I
24:09
Speaker 1: asked people like, oh, can I take this home and
24:11
Speaker 1: cook it? And every single person was like yes, no
24:13
Speaker 1: matter what I asked about. And the craziest thing I
24:16
Speaker 1: asked about was a giant salamander. And I don't know
24:20
Speaker 1: if you've ever seen one of these before. If they're
24:22
Speaker 1: all over Asia, not all over, but they're in Asia
24:27
Speaker 1: pretty widespread across Asia. They're literally giant salamanders. They can
24:33
Speaker 1: grow six feet in length like two meters pretty easily.
24:38
Speaker 1: And they had giant salamanders being sold as food. At
24:43
Speaker 1: this place that I was at, there was just a
24:46
Speaker 1: giant salamander. He was probably three and a half to
24:50
Speaker 1: four feet long, you know, one and a half meters almost,
24:54
Speaker 1: but that's still a pretty big animal, just curled up
24:58
Speaker 1: in a kiddie pool. And then they were all whole
25:00
Speaker 1: bunch of smaller ones, maybe a little under a meter,
25:04
Speaker 1: like seven or eight of those in another kiddie pool,
25:06
Speaker 1: and they were just waiting for someone to buy them
25:08
Speaker 1: and take them home and cut them up and eat
25:10
Speaker 1: them up. And it was so bizarre to see them
25:12
Speaker 1: because I've only seen those in studio ghibli movies. They're
25:17
Speaker 1: you know, they're like axelautal level cute creatures even though
25:20
Speaker 1: they're huge. They're two meters long when they grow up.
25:24
Speaker 1: So it was jarring to see this giant animal sitting
25:29
Speaker 1: that I've never seen before in real life right in
25:32
Speaker 1: front of me, and a whole bunch of his little
25:34
Speaker 1: brothers in the kiddi pool next to him. And if
25:36
Speaker 1: you're wondering about the legality of any of this, some
25:40
Speaker 1: of these things were not listed as legal for sure,
25:44
Speaker 1: but it's China. They have different animal laws that whatever
25:51
Speaker 1: is up with the legality of which animals you can
25:54
Speaker 1: sell it a Chinese wet market that has been figured
25:56
Speaker 1: out by the proprietors of the wet market and the
26:01
Speaker 1: cops a long time ago that is settled history and
26:04
Speaker 1: anything at this market you can buy, which includes the puppies, dogs, kittens, cats,
26:11
Speaker 1: and I made sure to check like, oh, are these
26:12
Speaker 1: for food? And the guys like food or pets whatever?
26:15
Speaker 1: Man in Mandarin. Of course, my Cantonese is terrible, like
26:20
Speaker 1: I know basically nothing, but a few of the people
26:22
Speaker 1: could speak Mandarin and I could speak numbers in Cantonese,
26:26
Speaker 1: so I muddled through. But whenever I found someone who
26:29
Speaker 1: could speak Mandarin, I'd be yeah, I'd ask them is
26:32
Speaker 1: this for eating? Pointing to like a gaggle of puppies,
26:35
Speaker 1: and they'd be like.
26:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, or pet?
26:38
Speaker 1: You know, do you want to eat it? Because yeah,
26:40
Speaker 1: but if you want a pet then yes. Also turtles,
26:44
Speaker 1: more turtle kinds than I have ever seen in my
26:47
Speaker 1: entire life. Hard shell, soft shell. I've never seen, like
26:50
Speaker 1: a really really soft shell. And there was one turtle
26:53
Speaker 1: that just looked like if it didn't have a shell
26:55
Speaker 1: at all, what a turtle would look like. It was bizarre. Yeah,
27:01
Speaker 1: it was just a smooth skin turtle, like it didn't
27:04
Speaker 1: even have the leather back, like thick back but still
27:09
Speaker 1: soft thing. It was just just a no shell turtle,
27:13
Speaker 1: every kind, dozens of kinds of turtles and hundreds of
27:16
Speaker 1: each kind waiting to be sold. How many puppies and
27:20
Speaker 1: cats I don't know, two thousand in this one area,
27:24
Speaker 1: sold by a couple people. They just had kennels and
27:27
Speaker 1: kennels and kennles and cannles and kennles.
27:29
Speaker 2: And I feel like a lot.
27:30
Speaker 1: Of people were going there to buy pets rather than eat.
27:33
Speaker 1: But I am sure that some people were going there
27:36
Speaker 1: to buy them for food also, because that's what the
27:40
Speaker 1: seller told me. And also I've eaten dog in China.
27:44
Speaker 1: It's not an unheard of cuisine there, although it's becoming
27:50
Speaker 1: far less popular, especially with younger generations as time goes on.
27:54
Speaker 1: But as I mentioned up top, a lot of these
27:56
Speaker 1: people who are still alive in China grew up during
27:59
Speaker 1: the mouths of Don't Eat Leap Forward and have literally
28:02
Speaker 1: zero food because all of their food was trucked to
28:04
Speaker 1: the north. If you have an animal like a dog
28:06
Speaker 1: or a cat who has eight babies and they have
28:09
Speaker 1: meat that you can eat and you have literally no meat,
28:13
Speaker 1: yeah you're going to eat the meat. And I was
28:15
Speaker 1: pretty familiar with the history, so I knew the dogs
28:18
Speaker 1: and the cats were coming up. But there's always a
28:21
Speaker 1: little bit of glee when a Chinese person can be like, hey,
28:23
Speaker 1: you know these dogs are for eating, because Americans are
28:27
Speaker 1: known to be so crazy about our dogs. But every
28:31
Speaker 1: time someone said that to me, I was like, oh,
28:33
Speaker 1: it's I ate some and jiamusa. No problem doesn't bother
28:36
Speaker 1: me that much. I recognize animals as and humans as meat.
28:43
Speaker 1: I don't eat humans, and I don't regularly eat dog
28:46
Speaker 1: meat or anything. But it's not that weird to me
28:50
Speaker 1: when you have super smart pigs that some people eat dogs,
28:55
Speaker 1: a four leg an animal made of meat versus pigs,
28:58
Speaker 1: a four leg an animal made of meat. It's not
29:01
Speaker 1: crazy to me to go to a different country and
29:04
Speaker 1: see an animal I'm not used to seeing be eaten.
29:08
Speaker 1: Americans eat pigs, they won't eat dogs, Koreans will eat dogs,
29:13
Speaker 1: Italians eat horses. Everyone eats different stuff. Okay, so stuff's
29:17
Speaker 1: getting a little little shocking, a little surprising for you here,
29:23
Speaker 1: all right, So let's move on to the mice and
29:25
Speaker 1: the rats. I still am not sure what I got.
29:29
Speaker 1: It was either a large mouse or a small rat,
29:32
Speaker 1: and their hands and feet are sort of pinioned out
29:37
Speaker 1: like spread eagle. So they cut them open and then
29:41
Speaker 1: cure the meat. They take off a lot of the fur,
29:45
Speaker 1: but there was a little bit of the fur on
29:46
Speaker 1: the one I bought, and on a few of them.
29:49
Speaker 1: They spread them out and dry them and cure the
29:51
Speaker 1: meat and then they sell it. And it's supposedly a
29:55
Speaker 1: common snack that you can have with beer. So I
29:59
Speaker 1: took one home and try to cook it up. There's
30:02
Speaker 1: so little edible meat on a mouse, it doesn't make
30:07
Speaker 1: any sense to eat them in modern times. But again
30:10
Speaker 1: this is clearly part of the tradition coming from the
30:15
Speaker 1: Great Famine, the Great Leap Forward. That was a great famine,
30:19
Speaker 1: Like there are mice always everywhere, so of course they're
30:23
Speaker 1: going to catch them and eat them when you don't
30:24
Speaker 1: have any other food. And it was really interesting because
30:26
Speaker 1: it was a really intricate process to cure all of
30:29
Speaker 1: these mice. And the lady had hundreds of them in piles.
30:32
Speaker 1: Lots of the vendors just had hundreds of piles of
30:36
Speaker 1: mount mice or rats or whatever they were, and you
30:38
Speaker 1: could buy them by the pound. And the lady who
30:41
Speaker 1: I bought from was like, no, no, you need too.
30:43
Speaker 1: One just isn't enough meat. And I was like, oh,
30:46
Speaker 1: it's okay, I only need one. One is definitely enough
30:50
Speaker 1: for me to find out what a mouse or rat
30:52
Speaker 1: tastes like. And man, I cooked that for forty five
30:56
Speaker 1: minutes or something. I just steamed it straight for four
31:00
Speaker 1: forty five minutes and then I ate it, and it
31:03
Speaker 1: tasted pretty good, like the skin had been cured and
31:06
Speaker 1: salt brined or something. So the actual meat, the little
31:10
Speaker 1: half bite I got of it, was not bad. I
31:14
Speaker 1: can see why people would eat. And I especially saw
31:16
Speaker 1: it why people ate it with beer down there, because
31:18
Speaker 1: it'd be really easy to drink a beer and then
31:20
Speaker 1: a piece of salted cured meat, just a little munch,
31:25
Speaker 1: a little nibble to get that salty cured meat flavor,
31:29
Speaker 1: just the meat flavor, really, and you chew that up
31:32
Speaker 1: and then you could have another thing of beer, like
31:34
Speaker 1: chicken paws. Chicken feet are really a popular drinking snack
31:38
Speaker 1: in China, and it's the same thing. There's not a
31:40
Speaker 1: lot of meat on them, but it is kind of
31:43
Speaker 1: fun to eat the what meat there is off the
31:47
Speaker 1: chicken foot. Just get a flavor of meat and have
31:50
Speaker 1: something to munch on, even if you're not getting a
31:52
Speaker 1: lot of nutrition out of it because you're drinking and
31:54
Speaker 1: passing the time with a snack. So I understood the
31:58
Speaker 1: like why you would eat it. But I didn't buy
32:00
Speaker 1: any more mice after that first one, except someone did
32:05
Speaker 1: buy a bunch of mice and asked me to drink
32:08
Speaker 1: beer and eat mice with them. And I ate a
32:12
Speaker 1: bowl of mice with this guy who was very excited
32:15
Speaker 1: to eat mice and drink beer with the foreigner, and
32:20
Speaker 1: he ate everything he inhaled everything that was not bone,
32:25
Speaker 1: while I was more I generally tried to just get
32:28
Speaker 1: the edible meat off of the mouse corpse. All right,
32:34
Speaker 1: let's move on from the mouse corpse to something you
32:36
Speaker 1: might find more shocking. Oh, and they did have all
32:39
Speaker 1: the normal meat, like all the normal beef and pork
32:43
Speaker 1: and everything that was already cut up and portioned. They
32:45
Speaker 1: had a huge warehouse with maybe a thousand different cellars
32:49
Speaker 1: different butchers just in that house. So you would walk
32:51
Speaker 1: into the abbatoir and get whatever food you wanted, every
32:56
Speaker 1: portioned meat. Okay, but this is the one that surprised
32:59
Speaker 1: me the most. After I went through this warehouse, I
33:02
Speaker 1: was like, wow, have.
33:04
Speaker 2: I seen everything? Oh wait, you know what. I didn't
33:06
Speaker 2: talk about the snakes. No you won't.
33:08
Speaker 1: Let's just move on. Let's move on to the shocking.
33:10
Speaker 1: This was the climax for me of this wet market.
33:14
Speaker 1: Were live crocodiles, live hissing, growling, moving, squirming, walking crocodiles. Actually,
33:25
Speaker 1: you know what, I think, I'm automatically saying crocodiles, But
33:27
Speaker 1: they were alligators. I believe Asian alligators because they had
33:31
Speaker 1: the broader snouts. But they were huge, easily three meters
33:37
Speaker 1: long from snout to tail. And I actually like crocodile
33:41
Speaker 1: a lot ever since I tried it in Cambodia. I
33:45
Speaker 1: was kind of blown away by the dish that they
33:47
Speaker 1: made it in, which was just larbor, some regular meat
33:51
Speaker 1: salad dish that was really good, but the texture of
33:54
Speaker 1: it was great because I love frog and amphibian and
33:57
Speaker 1: I guess that's why I like crocodile also. So since
34:01
Speaker 1: I knew they had everything at this market, I was
34:04
Speaker 1: asking around and eventually found the crocodile or alligator seller
34:09
Speaker 1: and there were a lot of people around there. I
34:11
Speaker 1: feel like half of them were trying to just get
34:14
Speaker 1: a glimpse at the alligator itself, but the other half
34:18
Speaker 1: were definitely screaming out portions egen, the on gin sang jin,
34:22
Speaker 1: and they were just shouting out like how many pounds
34:25
Speaker 1: of the meat they wanted. And there was a half
34:28
Speaker 1: butchered corpse of an alligator on just on the counter,
34:33
Speaker 1: and one butcher behind it with a huge butcher's knife. No,
34:38
Speaker 1: those would be cleavers, right, So there's one guy standing
34:41
Speaker 1: behind a half butchered corpse of an alligator with a cleaver,
34:44
Speaker 1: and he'd get the on gin and he'd cut off
34:47
Speaker 1: the young gin, weigh it, grab the money from that guy,
34:50
Speaker 1: look around someone else egen, and he'd cut off a
34:53
Speaker 1: slightly smaller portion, weigh it, give it to the I
34:55
Speaker 1: get the money, and they just keep shouting at him.
34:58
Speaker 1: And he would just be cutting up this crocodile again
35:01
Speaker 1: and again and again, and you could ask for the
35:03
Speaker 1: tail or certain parts of the body, the ribs if
35:05
Speaker 1: you wanted. Alligator ribs are so Actually they were crocodile
35:09
Speaker 1: ribs that I got in Thailand, but I cooked those up.
35:11
Speaker 1: They're super soft. They're like the crocodile ribs were like gluesticks,
35:17
Speaker 1: very soft, considering they were rib bones, but they're called
35:22
Speaker 1: like soft ribs. I don't know. It was bizarre. I
35:24
Speaker 1: didn't know ribs looked like that in a crocodile, but
35:27
Speaker 1: I guess they do, Okay. Anyway, back to the wide market,
35:30
Speaker 1: So this guy was just carving up the alligator and
35:33
Speaker 1: I just watched him butcher an alligator as everyone shouted
35:37
Speaker 1: out pounds and took away bits of crocodile meat here
35:39
Speaker 1: and there, until finally there was no meat left. Like
35:44
Speaker 1: that crocodile was butchered. It was all done, and I'm
35:48
Speaker 1: sure they were going to keep the bones and stew
35:50
Speaker 1: something whatever, but I didn't expect what was gonna happen. Next,
35:55
Speaker 1: they pulled the butchered corpse of an alligator off the table,
36:02
Speaker 1: and he had his assistance just haul it off and
36:05
Speaker 1: put it on the side next to the other live alligator,
36:09
Speaker 1: who they picked up unceremoniously, one by the taped up
36:14
Speaker 1: snout and one by the tail, dumped it in front
36:16
Speaker 1: of the butcher and he cleaved into this alligator's neck,
36:22
Speaker 1: just hacked away three four times, severed the brain stem.
36:27
Speaker 1: The animal was dead instantly, and it just kept going.
36:30
Speaker 1: There was like a thirty second break where they took
36:32
Speaker 1: off the old corpse put on the new body, which
36:35
Speaker 1: quickly became a corpse when he cut off its spinal column.
36:38
Speaker 1: And people kept screaming the whole time because they want
36:41
Speaker 1: the fresh meat and crocodile or alligator meat. And he
36:46
Speaker 1: just started carbonov hunks again, weighing it took the money,
36:48
Speaker 1: kept going, and the process just kept going. And there
36:51
Speaker 1: were two alligator salesmen right next to each other, and
36:54
Speaker 1: I went to look at the other one too, because
36:55
Speaker 1: the other one still had a live one that he
36:58
Speaker 1: was still working on his first alligat and hadn't moved
37:01
Speaker 1: on to the second one yet. And I was just
37:03
Speaker 1: a a live alligator. And once you tape up its mouth,
37:08
Speaker 1: I guess it's not very dangerous. So it wasn't It
37:13
Speaker 1: wasn't secured. It was behind like a ply wood wall
37:19
Speaker 1: that the butcher was standing behind. And that was one butcher,
37:22
Speaker 1: one assistant. And while the butcher's cutting off the pieces
37:25
Speaker 1: and the amounts, the people are screaming at him and
37:27
Speaker 1: taking the money. The assistant's doing whatever he says, Maybe
37:30
Speaker 1: he'll get the money from a guy or deliver the meat.
37:33
Speaker 1: The butcher just carved up, but also he's wrangling the
37:37
Speaker 1: alligator who when I showed up, hiss roared and raised
37:43
Speaker 1: his mouth up, but the snout was all closed up,
37:47
Speaker 1: but the mouth was like its head was almost a
37:50
Speaker 1: meter long, and it just up in the air, this
37:54
Speaker 1: huge hiss coming from his chest, and it took a
37:59
Speaker 1: few steps forward, and the butcher didn't even glance back,
38:04
Speaker 1: but the assistant looked back, and when he saw like
38:06
Speaker 1: it was moving forward, he just grabbed it by the
38:08
Speaker 1: tail and yanked it back to where it was waiting
38:11
Speaker 1: to be butchered behind the guy originally. And the butcher
38:16
Speaker 1: didn't even blink. He just kept on this first animal
38:19
Speaker 1: because he had to get to the second because he
38:21
Speaker 1: had to sell. I'm sure they don't want to carry
38:22
Speaker 1: it back home. And that was just crazy to see it.
38:27
Speaker 1: I probably spent half an hour just watching the two
38:30
Speaker 1: alligator stalls, like these were huge animals and they were
38:35
Speaker 1: just working through them like you would work through any
38:37
Speaker 1: other butchered animal. I think I got a pound of
38:41
Speaker 1: alligator from the second guy, the one who still had
38:44
Speaker 1: the live alligator behind him, and I cooked it up,
38:47
Speaker 1: but I cooked it a little too long, so it
38:49
Speaker 1: wasn't the texture I like. It was still really good,
38:53
Speaker 1: and I cooked it with my favorite hot pot bas
38:55
Speaker 1: of course, so it was great, but I just overcooked
38:58
Speaker 1: it a bit, definitely. Say, after I bought and some alligator,
39:03
Speaker 1: a pound of alligator made from this guy that I
39:05
Speaker 1: participated in that wet market, I forgot to mention snakes.
39:09
Speaker 1: They had snakes of every kind I've ever seen. I
39:12
Speaker 1: have no idea how many varieties of those were poisonous.
39:15
Speaker 1: I'm sure some of them were. And they had them
39:17
Speaker 1: either in like open empty kittie pools. Actually they had
39:21
Speaker 1: some in water kittie pools because see snakes. But they
39:25
Speaker 1: had hundreds of dry land snakes in each kiddie pool,
39:29
Speaker 1: just slithering around each other. And you could order as
39:32
Speaker 1: much as you wanted, and the guy would reach in
39:35
Speaker 1: with a hook or his hand I saw, and just
39:37
Speaker 1: throw as many as you, said, eight snakes boscha into
39:42
Speaker 1: a bag, and then he'd hand you a bag with
39:45
Speaker 1: eight snakes in it, and you would pay him, you know,
39:47
Speaker 1: five bucks, and you would walk off with your eight snakes.
39:50
Speaker 1: And I should have got a snake, because I've never
39:53
Speaker 1: eaten a snake, and I'm still very curious I feel
39:56
Speaker 1: like maybe the market was so big. After I got
39:58
Speaker 1: the alligator, I was like, yes, that's enough, because I
40:01
Speaker 1: don't want to walk all the way back to Snaketown
40:03
Speaker 1: and snake Town it was there was there were a
40:06
Speaker 1: lot of snakes, thousands, and yeah. It was pretty cool
40:10
Speaker 1: to just see him sure, are sure? And then the
40:13
Speaker 1: snakeman would just pick up handfuls of snakes, throw him
40:16
Speaker 1: in a bag, give him to the guy, take the money,
40:17
Speaker 1: and just sit back down in his lawn chair waiting
40:19
Speaker 1: for the next guy to tell him how many snakes
40:21
Speaker 1: they wanted, of what kind what else.
40:24
Speaker 2: They did have a bug section.
40:25
Speaker 1: They had a ton of crickets you could buy like
40:28
Speaker 1: in Thailand or raw They had, I don't know, all
40:31
Speaker 1: kinds of way more bugs than they haven't tied. And
40:33
Speaker 1: Thailand they have like a few different bugs, and they're
40:36
Speaker 1: usually they're either the grubs, the beetles, the large like
40:40
Speaker 1: tree beetles, or grasshoppers. Those are the popular ones in Thailand.
40:46
Speaker 1: And I don't really like the grubs or the big
40:47
Speaker 1: beetles much, although the big beetles just taste like peanut butter,
40:51
Speaker 1: I guess, like a dry peanut butter. I like the
40:54
Speaker 1: crickets because they're basically just like popcorn. They're crunchy. They're
40:57
Speaker 1: usually fried in oil and salt, just like popcorn mostly.
41:02
Speaker 1: And in China they had those three and another twenty
41:05
Speaker 1: bugs and I'm just eating enough bugs. I was like, no,
41:08
Speaker 1: I get it, like I understand.
41:10
Speaker 2: It's very it's good for No. No, yeah, thank you.
41:14
Speaker 1: I just I'm okay. I've eaten bugs before. That's a
41:18
Speaker 1: monster catfish, like human sized catfish. Catfish get pretty big,
41:25
Speaker 1: and these guys had those pretty big catfish just waiting
41:29
Speaker 1: to be taken home. Ayan they had a bird section,
41:32
Speaker 1: every kind of bird, every kind of bird. Yeah, they
41:35
Speaker 1: had I don't know, parrots, pair of keets, eagles probably,
41:39
Speaker 1: I don't know. If I saw a bald eagle there,
41:42
Speaker 1: I should have looked more. I bet someone had a
41:44
Speaker 1: bald eagle there somewhere. Actually, probably not. That would probably
41:49
Speaker 1: be if that showed up on TikToker, one of the
41:53
Speaker 1: Chinese social media like, and an American saw bald eagle
41:56
Speaker 1: being sold at the wet market. I bet that would
41:58
Speaker 1: create an international incident. That might be one of the
42:01
Speaker 1: rules that that market has, like nothing so obviously culturally
42:08
Speaker 1: offensive that there's like no history of eating for or
42:12
Speaker 1: indigenous nature in the country. You just want to eat
42:15
Speaker 1: a bald eagle. But I bet if you went down,
42:18
Speaker 1: I bet someone selling bald eagles in China somewhere. What
42:21
Speaker 1: else did they have all the jerkys. Oh, they had
42:25
Speaker 1: a barbecue quarter, which is pretty rare, like barbecue or shaukow.
42:32
Speaker 1: Like at the place they had that full skewered pig.
42:36
Speaker 1: They also just had ribs you could buy, which is
42:38
Speaker 1: not common to buy barbecued ribs. They're usually steamed or
42:43
Speaker 1: in a soup or something like that in China. And
42:46
Speaker 1: these were, yeah, just straight up barbecued ribs that you
42:48
Speaker 1: could get salted with like the five spice dry spice.
42:53
Speaker 1: Not a lot of wet barbecue sauces in China.
42:56
Speaker 2: I don't think I bought any ribs.
42:58
Speaker 1: There, which is a little odd, but maybe it was
43:00
Speaker 1: because I was so excited to get back home and
43:02
Speaker 1: cook my alligator meat. I did get a genbing because
43:06
Speaker 1: it was technically still breakfast time, and I was like,
43:10
Speaker 1: it's outside of my eating window, but this is an experience.
43:13
Speaker 1: I want to have a good breakfast while I'm here.
43:15
Speaker 1: And then after I did all that I walked down
43:17
Speaker 1: the road for like forty five minutes and then I was.
43:21
Speaker 2: Like, okay, this is too big. Time to go home.
43:23
Speaker 1: This is crazy. And I went home and cooked the crocodile,
43:26
Speaker 1: and then a few hours later that night, I had
43:29
Speaker 1: some beers from the store. I got some beers and
43:32
Speaker 1: I cooked my rat mouse whatever it was, for forty
43:36
Speaker 1: five minutes until I was sure that nothing was surviving
43:40
Speaker 1: on it, and I.
43:43
Speaker 2: Was like, yeah, pretty good.
43:44
Speaker 1: And that's all I needed for the rat mouse. I
43:48
Speaker 1: just was curious about it. So, yeah, if you want
43:52
Speaker 1: all the normal stuff and a bunch besides, you just
43:56
Speaker 1: go to any wet market in China, at any part
43:59
Speaker 1: of China. Every country is going to have them. Ask
44:02
Speaker 1: a local where the local wet market is. You know what,
44:06
Speaker 1: I can't remember the Mandarin word for wet market. That's weird,
44:12
Speaker 1: shangdien shang chang. Is that No, that's all shir chog.
44:17
Speaker 1: I think that's it's shir Chong. So this was just
44:20
Speaker 1: a giant shir Chong, just a huge like market. And yeah,
44:26
Speaker 1: if you go down to the south, then you're gonna
44:29
Speaker 1: find everything else. You're gonna find animals you didn't know
44:33
Speaker 1: were real being sold like they were common commodities. I
44:39
Speaker 1: wonder if it was Shundu shir Chong because that's like
44:41
Speaker 1: the name of the town and it's the central market
44:45
Speaker 1: of the town. So maybe it was just Shunda shir
44:47
Speaker 1: Chang or something. It was the neighborhood name shir Chang,
44:50
Speaker 1: and I don't think it was shun dubit it. It
44:52
Speaker 1: was just the specific neighborhood. If you go to China,
44:57
Speaker 1: seeing a wet market in the south was definitely memory
45:03
Speaker 1: worth having. I'm very glad I got to go. I
45:07
Speaker 1: didn't plan on it, but a friend convinced me to
45:10
Speaker 1: go with her to see the market because I thought
45:13
Speaker 1: I had seen every wet market over the six years
45:15
Speaker 1: or whatever I lived in China. I was just visiting
45:18
Speaker 1: there this time, and I was like, I go to
45:20
Speaker 1: what market's a lot? I go to hir Chog all
45:22
Speaker 1: the time. And she convinced me, and my eyes popped
45:29
Speaker 1: out of my head every two minutes, like it's unbelievable
45:32
Speaker 1: just to remember, like me living these memories now, just
45:37
Speaker 1: having them run through my brain is still somewhat unbelievable.
45:42
Speaker 1: Seeing them PLoP that alligator on top and the butcher
45:45
Speaker 1: sever its skull from the spinal column and it's still
45:49
Speaker 1: twitching while he's carving off the next pound or five
45:52
Speaker 1: that whatever next customer wants, or the bags of snakes.
45:57
Speaker 1: That was pretty crazy. Oh, they had thousands of frogs.
45:59
Speaker 1: Of course I did buy a few, but the ones
46:03
Speaker 1: I got were too soft. They tasted weird compared to
46:06
Speaker 1: the other ones. And it turns out I just wasn't
46:08
Speaker 1: cooking them long enough. So I feel like at the
46:11
Speaker 1: restaurants they must cook them once and then cook them
46:14
Speaker 1: again real quick, because when they fry them up or
46:16
Speaker 1: cook them up for me at the restaurants, it's pretty quick.
46:19
Speaker 1: They only take like five ten minutes maybe, And I
46:23
Speaker 1: had to cook mine for a good forty five minutes
46:25
Speaker 1: or something before they got to the consistency of frog
46:28
Speaker 1: meat that I like. Yeah, I recommend going to these markets.
46:31
Speaker 1: It's a fascinating experience, even if you're just in the north,
46:34
Speaker 1: it's really fun. Like I said, it'll sort of orient
46:38
Speaker 1: you in the town you're in. You'll get a lot
46:41
Speaker 1: of the cultural flavor because that's where all the locals.
46:43
Speaker 1: They find their shirt chong close to them, because that's
46:46
Speaker 1: where you get all the fresh meat and produce and
46:49
Speaker 1: they're just fun to figure out what they have and
46:51
Speaker 1: who's selling witch snacks because some people who make better
46:54
Speaker 1: foods than others and have more interesting trinkets that you
46:58
Speaker 1: can look at. And then if you're in the South,
47:00
Speaker 1: you have to go to one because you can see
47:02
Speaker 1: giant salamanders and yeah, giant clams, lobsters and alligators all
47:07
Speaker 1: over the place, buckets of snakes. I'm really glad I
47:11
Speaker 1: went there. I'm really glad I was taken there. Glad
47:15
Speaker 1: I tried a mouse, Glad I got to get some alligator.
47:19
Speaker 1: Thank you very much for listening to this shir Chong
47:22
Speaker 1: episode of a Bit of a Rambler. You can talk
47:25
Speaker 1: to me at bit of a Rambler, gmail dot com
47:28
Speaker 1: or all thesocials and I'll get some more stories out
47:33
Speaker 1: to you soon