SC - Caught off guard, or, experiencing the ancient

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Hullo, the list!

Nothing too important here, but I just had an experience I thought worth sharing...

My lady wife has mentioned several times recently that on Thursday
mornings there is a Chinese guy selling vegetables out of the back of a
truck around the corner from our apartment building. Once or twice she's
brought back wedges of winter melon and similar stuff, and she mentioned
in passing that recently he's been accompanied by another guy with a
truck full of fish.

This morning I went out early to case the joint, as it were.

It was a glorious time-travel experience. We already have several local
choices for buying fresh Asian produce and groceries, but this was
something different: a spontaneous open-air market that erupted on an
otherwise quiet, tree-lined side street.

Among other sights and sounds, all within perhaps 200 yards of my front door:

Beautiful whole dun gua, winter melon, with the stall owner cutting off
wedges to order, grousing cheerfully each time somebody didn't want to
buy a whole melon...("This would be perfect for steaming whole with ham
and black mushrooms! Why spoil a beautiful melon like this by cutting
into it here???")

Entire hanks of three-inch-long, sweet bananas...

Flats of brown eggs with bits of white feathers still stuck to them...

Little old Asian ladies and gentlemen cheerfully trying to sneak ahead
of me on line, with the truck owner saying loudly in Cantonese he
assumed I wouldn't understand (but did, thankyouverymuch), "Don't sneak
ahead of the big hairy fellow! He'll take you home and eat you!" [I've
recently acquired a short military beard, hence the hairy reference, I assume.]

Hot steamed pork buns to eat while on line, thus keeping kids busy...

Some of the most creative haggling I've heard in my life, in about six
different languages... "One maw, one maw, fi' dallah, don't be cheap, my
son go to college and be in different business from his old man! TWO
dallah???" (Muttered imprecations in, I think, the Hakkah dialect,
generally focussing on cheap people who try to take advantage of good
people with sons in college.) Lots of yelling at the elders who, ahem,
missed the end of the line...

Fuji apples, pears, and sah lee, Asian pears, lotus root packed in
straw, an enormous variety of local and tropical fruit, as well as some
sweet melons I didn't recognize...

Long green squash, one of the contenders for the medieval European gourd
or pampion (pumpkin); I picked up a large one of those, about four
pounds, paid about a dollar for it...
 
Lovely sweet-smelling squid, whole and unfrozen with ink sacs
intact...interesting price scheme...one pound was seven dollars, two
pounds seven dollars, three, ditto, etc., because he wanted to sell
five-pound increments for seven dollars. I bought five, of course.

Blue crabs, including some roe-bearing females, with a couple extra
thrown into every half-dozen or dozen if the guy liked your face...

Some fish which were probably really either some type of plaice or sand
dabs, but which everyone around me called flounder (they were unusual in
that they had two brown sides, unlike the local flounder or fluke I'm
accustomed to), which smelled like sweet cucumbers...I bought one for a dollar.

Little silver butterfish, mirror-bright, a little like tiny pompanos. I
bought a couple of pounds (eight or ten fish) for salting, freezing, and
subsequent steaming over rice. The man asked me, in broken English, what
I intended to do with them, and when I told him, his smile was broad indeed...

Believe me, we have many, many wonderful indoor stores and markets (far
more than most places, in fact), but this was so much more fun, and it's
been going on, nearly unchanged, for thousands of years. That part was
fun, too! Now if only they hawked wafers on the street, in proper
medieval fashion, I'd be thrilled. I'm waiting patiently, though,
because they _do_ sell wafers on the street in Chinatown. I figure it's
only a matter of time.
  
Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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