Guangzhou II

On Saturday, I, D, and 18 of our colleagues chartered a small bus to Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton).

Our first stop was the haizhu market. Almost everyone in the group was intent on buying Christmas decorations here -- kind of hard to come by in China. This market is typical of China -- a multi-story building filled to the rafters with hundreds of odd little shops selling all kinds of stuff. It's easy to get lost in these places.

I picked up some little trinkets -- little goodies to pass out in class for "prizes" or to give to people as small gifts. D, however, came across the atrocity pictured to the right. For some reason that I fail to understand, D fell in love with it, and now it lords over our apartment.

Our second stop was for lunch, which we received free of charge from the Spanish consulate in China. It seems that Spanish Chamber of Commerce was co-hosting some big shin-dig, and one of our colleagues, who is from Spain, arranged to get us in. Lunch was served outside in a part alongside the water. Free Spanish beer, Spanish-style hors d'oeurves, and paella, which was cooked up in gigantic paella pans. It was a good way to spend the afternoon, and if Metro's siren song hadn't been calling, we probably would have wasted day there drinking cerveza and stuffing ourselves with free grub.




I've posted a bit about Metro before -- it's a useful store to have relatively nearby since it has food from non-Chinese countries (ex., Olive oil, bleu cheese, etc.). D and I mainly treated it as a booze run since Metro also stocks US favorites like Seagram's Gin and Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum.

This store is kind of tricky. In some ways, it's like Cosco -- bulk sizes of popular groceries. Odd collection of things like light bulbs and bathrobes and printer cartridges. But then you'll encounter something like the meat aisle, which in Metro looks like a slaughterhouse (like in the first Rocky when Rocky uses the sides of beef as punching bags). At Metro, you can buy a half pig that's hanging from a big meat hook. You can buy parts of the cow (also hanging). Fish in various states of life, death, and dressing are available too. And then there was this:


It even had it's teeth and eyeballs still in its head. Now I can't get that damn song from D's Barbecue Blues album out of my head:

Take a big slice of gator,/put it on a big piece of bread./Salt will make it better./So go ahead, go ahead, take a big bite, Fred./ Alligator/Alligator meat! Alligator!/Alligator meat is really all you need.