Shopping in China - Part 5 - The Suzhou Market

In Suzhou, we took a canal cruise.  There are canals all over the place, and you can get in a little boat with an outdoor deck and cruise down the river.  We had a good time on the ride looking at the houses along the river, and we even saw a few weddings.  I believe we ended up being in as many pictures as we took.

Celery told us that the dialect in Suzhou had similar words for beautiful and ugly, and that it was poor form to get them mixed up. "Ah yu yu" means lovely, and "Ah ya ya" means unattractive.  Because it's so easy to associate with "Aye yi yi", it's easy to remember the difference.

So when we saw all the brides along the river, a few of us catcalled from the boat, "Ah yu yu!"  Luckily we didn't get it wrong.

To give you an idea of the size of the boat was vs the canals, have a look:

The boat barely fit down some of the narrow "canal"-leyways.

Also, along the canals were the back of peoples' residences.  Stone steps often led right down to the water. We saw one lady washing her produce in the canal.  The same canal into which we were leaking oil and gas out of our boat engine.  You'd usually see some plants that they were growing, and some laundry hanging nearby.  This is a good example:

So what does this have to do with shopping?  Well, this little riverboat tour was what we took to get to the marketplace.

This market was not for tourists.  This market was for locals.  This was the real Chinese market.  We were warned not to take pictures of individual people, as they are proud, but poor.  They don't like their photos taken if it's because they look poor.  This was the food that the locals lived on.  This was where they walked or used a motor scooter to get to for family supplies, maybe daily.

It was a narrow open-air market. The stalls generally consisted of a tabletop with some bowls or pans of either raw meat, vegetables or fruit, or even pans of cooked food.  We'd been warned sternly not to eat this stuff or I would have tried something.

So I can't remember what was in the bowls, but I think that the front left is chicken heads, the front right is whole baby birds of some kind, and midleft is chicken legs/feet.

Who knows what these are? Hit me in the comments to tell me!  Note that we're all taking pictures of this stuff, and that many of us have beer. 

I believe that these are congealed blood cakes in a big bowl of water. 

There was a very large stall that sold a lot of live animals.  They had cages of rabbits, chickens, other birds.   

You have to keep the veggies in cages or they run away.  China is a weird place...

Ok, so I don't know what these all are.  I assert that it's probably organ meat.  Literally, I think that one on the front left is some kind of animal penis.

A selfie back along the market where it was covered.  Photobombed by Kristin.

A giant bowl of live toads or frogs. 

And you can see below some of the food that was waiting to be purchased, killed, cut up, and cooked:

The Suzhou marketplace was so very different from the other marketplaces we'd been to, but it was enough to convince me that this was an authentic market.

Next up, Part 6 - Chinatown in China!