I'm going to buy meat!

"Hey Sarah, what are you doing tomorrow?"
"I'm going to buy meat!"
"ummmm..what?"

That conversation actually happened on Thursday. Needless to say, I was greeted with two looks of confusion-maybe looks of wondering why I had to schedule purchasing anything, let alone meat. Here's the background: here in China there are many wet markets for food purchasing. You can get fruit at many fruit stands throughout the city, vegetables in open air buildings with many stalls, the same with meat products.

(For any fan of the comedian Brian Regan, his bit about the marbled meat has been going through my head this weekend)

A friend from church offered to take me to one of these markets since I had never been before, it helped me tremendously that she speaks Mandarin. Over here, so many people speak 2, 3, or 4 languages, we are so behind in the US. Anyway, it was quite an adventure.

We arrived at the freezer section of the market. We pulled up to a 15*10 foot space, with a saw, scale, counter and giant door. The freezer, the size of my apartment, was filled with many cuts and varieties of beef, pork, chicken, lamb, and sea food. We knew the beef was good so that was our first desire. It is labeled USDA checked beef and part of me thinks it is. However, I know this country too well to believe anything at first sight. If you don't want a 3kg hunk of beef for your freezer they will cut it into whatever size pieces you want. I went with 1 cm steaks. Now, buying this beef at a market is cheaper than your expat stores but still expensive by US standards. I tried not to balk when they told me the price. I won't go there too often and we don't eat meat too often so it will last awhile. To give some perspective, it was 90RMB for a .5kg. 90RMB is roughly $14 and .5kg is 1.16 lbs. So yeah, not cheap.

The meat is frozen solid, and they put it anywhere to get it out of the way, scale, table, saw, bags. I generally am not too much of a germ person but this was making me a little squeamish. I promise to cook everything thoroughly. I suppose if I actually knew how meat was processed in the US it would make me squeamish too. Blissful ignorance--for now.

Then we ordered cod. This is how it came out and also the saw (which of course isn't cleaned between the two cuttings):

After the cod was cut and the purchase of some scallops (yum!), we headed to the other side of the complex, the part where a lot of the product is alive or recently deceased. It was overwhelming.

The flooring is metal sheets that move and budge under weight and were wet but not slimy. I tried not to think about what I was stepping on. I saw many live shrimp, crab, lobster, scallops (which I have no idea how to deal with if I bought them live), plus lots of shellfish, fish and various other sea creatures I could not name. Most of the stalls we just rooms full of fish tanks, greenish, dark and generally not clean looking like Petco. I did buy some salmon for a lot cheaper than the store so I am excited for that.

While walking inside what was basically a giant warehouse with stalls many of the people seemed to prepping the bins for something, adding water and generally waiting. And then the commotion began. Large white Styrofoam boxes were wheeled in and everyone came running. The boxes had clear tape that read Malaysian Airlines. The fresh prawns and such had arrived. Everyone ran from their stalls, grabbed a bin, ripped it open and got the prawns into the water solution they had been preparing as quickly as possible. It was chaotic but really fun to see some of the ins and outs of the a market.

Here's some photos of the market, the last one shows the chaos of the new arrivals: