Buy Local, Buy Fresh ... Guangzhou Style

After the medical exam and nap, Kelly took us to a street market that is a few blocks from our hotel.  This particular market is one of the oldest in Guangzhou.  It was definitely a bit different than the farmer's markets we are familiar with in the US. 

The first couple of blocks we walked was the herbal and holistic medicine vendors.  There were a lot of dried seahorses, worms, and various types of mushrooms and other fungi.  There was also a shop that specialized in ginseng.  In China, there are two types of ginseng, red is one type, but I can't remember the other.  Kelly said that they use the red ginseng in the summer and the other type in the winter.  Many of these ingredients are used in soups, so I guess this is the Chinese version of chicken noodle soup.  The deeper you got into the market, the more interesting and exotic the goods became.  Towards the end of this section, there were live scorpions, turtles, and geckos.  Brian also caught a photo of dried snakes, but luckily for me, we did not see the live version.

There wasn't really a definitive transition between the holistic section and the next section, which left a few in our group a bit concerned.  After leaving the holistic section with the scorpions and turtles, the next live animals we stumbled upon were kittens.  I know that all of the old cliches are coming to mind, but let me ease your worries and let you know that we were entering the pet section of the market.  Kelly had mentioned to me that we would be walking through a pet section, and as we entered that street, I noticed that the shops also had leashes, collars, pet bowls and food.  It was definitely different than PetsMart, and there were also animals that we would not traditionally keep as pets.  There were lots of puppies for sale, most of them little dogs, but I did see yellow lab and golden retriever puppies.  I know that lab puppies are expensive in the US, but I bet it would be as cheap as $50 USD in China.  Of course, there is no way of getting it home, so there was no real need to even ask.  Besides dogs and cats, there were also a lot of fish, birds, turtles, and crabs for sale.  They even had ducks, a bird that I think was a crow, chipmunks, and two very entertaining black squirrels.  It was actually pretty cool.  I was showing Hana some of the puppies and telling her that she has two of them waiting for her at home.

Once we left the street market, we then went to a shopping mall.  This was not too terribly different than our malls, just bigger.  We did see some bootleg movies for sale in one of the shops, but I don't know if Harry Potter would be the same in Mandarin.  We thought about getting Michael a copy of Cars, which might help him learn Chinese since he knows the English version by heart, but we weren't sure if it would play on his DVD player.  All in all, it was a pretty interesting experience and definitely not something that you see everyday!