I am consistently amused while walking through the open-air market off Bowrington Road near my home. First impressions, as you’d expect, are that it’s quite foul-smelling and jam-packed with people, fish, produce and nastiness. The furthest thing from pleasant. But now, after walking through it countless times, usually on my way to somewhere else, I find it sweet and somewhat homey. I recognize the vendors. The produce guy nearest Canal Road really doesn’t like me, and I can’t figure out why. So I picked a new produce stand where the ladies are excited to sell me fruit. I’m excited to buy it, so the transaction is better all around.
During the morning and until dark settles, the market’s tide of shoppers, trucks, carts, bikes, tourists and those of us passing through slogs through like a polluted stream that some time ago exceeded its limit of both water and debris. Sort of interesting, really, how people can’t help but stop for a moment, without fail, to watch as a fish is slapped on a table and spends its last moments of hope flopping from side to side, flipping up and flicking smelly water on market dwellers. Slowly but surely it fades and joins the ranks of the other fish with mouths gaping, in their last moments of life. The vendors plop hopeful, new fish on the table strategically to draw the interest of passers-by. All sorts of fish: spotted, pink, yellow, blue, huge and tiny and shrimp and eel. Got a hankering for a fish head? They’ll sell it to you. Oh, and the skilled fish choppers show off the swim bladders, white-ish and stretched like a balloon that a clown would twist into a dog or a sword.
The first moment from the fish market that stuck with me, and sticks with me today, is this: A woman with a cigarette hanging off her lip, hawking fish in the middle of the market on the north side of the street — the left if you’re working your way from Wan Chai to Times Square — sloppily gathering a handful of some small fish into a basket and weighing it with a traditional Chinese scale. She wears a white apron over a gray long-sleeved cotton shirt. Dark pants. She’s heavy-set and has her hair pulled back. She brushes back a stray lock of hair from her face with the back of a rubber-glove-clad hand while holding up the scale so her customer can see. They agree on a price and she tosses the fish over her shoulder where the butcher goes to work. And she goes back to telling everyone in the market how good her fish is. At least I assume that’s what she’s saying. But across the stream of people passing through she can see the real line, stretching past her stall. I haven’t a clue why this one stall has the longest line, but it always does. You can’t get to some of the stalls for this line.
I’ve been told it’s best to stop in this market before noon to avoid the smell. But I’m fairly certain the timing doesn’t matter. It always smells. You deal. The real time to hit the market is after about 9 p.m., when you stumble out of the market on the Wan Chai side and look to the left to see a row of restaurants where big, round tables have been set up. The plastic stools are filled just as fast as the staff can set them up.
“Hello, have some dinner…”
“Hi, I just ate. But I’ll be back.”
Hello.
I love the tram. Look how happy I am! Today was a pretty funny day.
It started out with an early ferry ride to Central, where I stopped in my gym. My first choice of DVD, Heroes (season 1, disc 2) was out, so I picked up “Hot Fuzz.” It was cracked. So I went for The Office, and set the timer for 45 minutes. Laughs galore.
After that came the tram. So much Hong Kong for just 25 U.S. cents. Only you have to pay in Hong Kong dollars, so it takes 2 of those. I snagged some new earbuds at the Wan Chai Computer Centre then made my way to the unnamed repair stand, recommended by my boss, who got the recommendation from her predecessor. More laughs ensued when I presented my pickup slip. I did not share in this because I didn’t know what the three people at the stand were laughing about. I still am clueless. I didn’t pay a whole lot for the work, I thought. It’s a nice bag, so they weren’t making fun. They started laughing after reading the slip and again while trying to locate the bag. The man who took my bag yesterday wasn’t there today, so maybe it was some inside joke. Who knows? I’m glad they enjoyed it. I’ll return there.
Next, food. Peter Jeffrey’s favorite dumpling place. This was my third visit to the restaurant with the green tables (I don’t know it’s real name) and the first during off-peak hours. What a treat! The lady preparing dumplings for the next peak time took a liking to me. While I waited for my boiled vegetable dumplings, she let me watch and we talked about how much work she had to do, how good she is at making dumplings, you know, things like that. We didn’t really talk at all. We understood each other. Her co-worker kept her distance. I’m not sure she meant to, but she wore quite a scowl. I’ll never know why. Maybe because the manager kept telling her what to do. She brought me my milk, then a straw. Then she brought me my dumplings, in a bag with chopsticks and a spoon. I bet that had something to do with it. Not the spoon, but the relationship. I tried. I smiled at her. But the lady making dumplings, she was so sweet. I’ll go back and take her photo, with her dumpling mix, her shells, plate with water, glass of milk and tray with lines of not-so-perfectly shaped half-moon dumplings. And her welcoming smile.
I took my take-away, that’s take-out or to-go, next door to the office. In the “office lift lobby,” as it’s called, there was a woman checking herself out in one of the huge windows. She was wearing tight, black capri-length pants, an oversized white T-shirt and a belt over the shirt. She wasn’t happy with how she looked. She turned around, not paying attention to anyone walking by, checked out different angles. Still not satisfied. We were all looking at her. I thought, “There’s a reason the 80s ended.” I laughed to myself. And I had a pretty good laugh.
All in all, it was great.
Today I went grocery shopping for the first time. You know, for staples. Olive oil, peanut butter, jam. Things you buy when you know you’re going to stay in one place for a while. It felt really good. And anyone who knows me knows I love grocery shopping. The Discovery Bay ParknShop is different from the southside Kroger in many ways, but it’s grocery shopping nonetheless. And I liked it.
I bought steak, eggs and honey from New Zealand. My milk came through Singapore. Dried apricots from Turkey. Cheese from Bangkok. Orange juice from nearby China. Nice and fresh. The trolleys actually roll smoothly, even side-to-side. It just about rolled by itself it was so smooth. If they installed a slanted floor you could just let it roll down the decline, tossing things in along the way.
…
I stepped up to the cashier station and asked how I can get one of their cash back cards. Teresa, the cashier, says I have to fill out a form then get a card. So I take the form and push my cart off to the side so the gentleman behind me can check out. Teresa won’t have it. She comes out from behind the register to where I am over by the shampoo and wheels my cart back into her line. She insists that I fill it out there in line using my 12-pack of Coke Light. I don’t know why it’s called Coke Light and not Diet Coke. Sometimes you see Diet Coke. Sometimes Coca-Cola Light. They have the variety with a hint of lemon. To me it seems like more than a hint, but I prefer the lime anyway.
Back to the check-out. As I’m completing the form, Teresa takes it from me and runs off to get my cards. She goes through the formality of showing me the cards. “They all have the same number. This one,” she points, “goes on your keychain.” It has a little hole. This all makes sense. She scans the card and hands the packet with one credit-card size card and three keychain-size copies. I don’t know what I’ll do with all those cards. I guess I’ll do the same thing I did with the Kroger cards and Dick’s cards and CVS and Walgreens cards. Whoever thought of those keychain-sized cards should’ve thought to get rid of the credit-card-size ones. All I need is another card in my wallet.
I’m pondering all of this while Teresa is ringing up my cereal and peanut butter and pretzels. I put the cabinet items up there first, and the big items. The Coke Light and three big bottles of mineral water. Then she gets to the honey. It doesn’t have a bar code so she looks at it for a second then tries punching some numbers into the system. She gasps. The machine reads, “Deli item / $16,000.”
“Sssshhhh…” Teresa whispers, with her finger to her lips, her shoulders hunched a little. She looks around to see if anyone’s watching then scurries off, to return seconds later with a key that allows her to void all the transactions. “Sssshhh.”
I sort of laughed and tried to tell her it’s ok. No worries. She voided the whole transaction. So she has to pull out the three big bottles of mineral water, the Coke Light and all the rest so she can scan them again. But first she needs my cash back card. I pull it out of my wallet and fork it over. I’m glad she remembered it.
I laugh a little more and watch the register screen. I always forget to bring my reusable bags for things like this. But I guess because I ran to the grocery it wouldn’t have been easy to bring the bags. Next time. I’m planning to go back Friday to pick up some wine and beer. I’m still looking for clothespins too. Maybe at WingOn upstairs. Oh, and a drying rack. I couldn’t figure out how to get it from Ikea. The tag said to see customer service, but they didn’t know what I was talking about. Drying rack? Not here, they said. I bet they’ll have lighter ones in WingOn, anyway. Who wants a heavy drying rack? You’ll just have to move it. It’s better to have a lighter one, for moving purposes, as long as it dries. I guess they should all dry pretty much the same.
Steak and eggs and bread and milk. A $16,000 jar of honey. I’ll remember this.
“This is my last day here.” Teresa looks around, points to the store, the place. “This is not a good place.”
“Oh. Where are you going to go?” I ask her.
“Home,” she says, ringing up the last of the cold items. She’s had enough of ParknShop. I bet it’s her first week, and her last week. She seems really smart, maybe she’s on summer break from school and wanted to make some spending money. But is it really worth it to be here at the grocery wearing a glove on one hand and double-bagging dried apricots and setting the bulky items aside for delivery? I love how witty she is. She knows her boss will see the voided transaction. I’ve worked in retail and food service. You’re supposed to minimize those, for whatever reason. I thought it was a dumb rule too.
I really didn’t want this to be the last meeting between Teresa and me, so I asked her if she wants to hang out sometime. Her English comprehension is really good, but she doesn’t believe her ears. It’s not that I’m some hot shot. It’s just that most customers probably don’t tell their cashier they hope to hang out some time. “You know, get dinner or ice cream or hang out,” I say. “I’ll give you my phone number. Yeah,” I say, as she grins and laughs a little bit, just like I laughed a little bit when she told me how the ParknShop really isn’t a good place.
“Do you have Skype?” I do. She wipes up the perspiration from the gelato container (Tiramisu gelato!), scans and bags the last couple items, and tears off a sheet of paper for me to write my Skype name. It’s probably because we can chat on there without talking out loud. Maybe to see if I’m a real weirdo or what. We wait for the debit card to clear while i write out my Skype info. She looks at the paper, folds it and puts it in her right pants pocket. I hope she finds it later and looks me up.
We smile and say bye. We really smile at each other.
Today I went to the Hong Kong Book Fair. I’ll upload photos later, but all you really need to know is that I walked away with the following (and I haven’t stopped laughing since I left the fair):
- Hong Kong hiking guide
- Hong Kong concise history book
- 3-year subscription to The Economist
In the words of “As Seen on TV,” … “but wait, there’s more!” I haggled and finagled my way to having the following thrown in with my Economist subscription (the price was right… about half-off the newsstand price):
- Carry-on suitcase (red, with Newsweek emblazoned on the front. It rolls very well, so far)
- Toaster (black)
- 2 business-related statistics books published by The Economist
- Flash drive (red, with Newsweek emblazoned on the front)
I was debating between the 2- or 3-year subscription and the friendly salesmen (Dickson and some other guy who was also eating his lunch at the time though I think he was the leader of the operation) tried to convince me to get the 3-year subscription by offering this really nice-looking golf set.
“What am I going to do with a souvenir golf set, Dickson?” I asked the poor chap (he’s from the U.K. More on amazing accents later).
“Give it as a gift,” they both responded.
“My dad doesn’t golf! What else?”
That’s when they showed me the suitcase. Sweeeeet.
… still laughing and smiling and enjoying the free Internet access at Pacific Coffee Co. before I go to work. Speaking of which, there’s a meeting in 45 minutes. Thanks for reading!