Everyday Fun

Recently, when I have relaxed and thought about things other than grading and finals and lesson planning, I have tried to pick up a little Cantonese. Not much, but enough to ask prices at a Cantonese market. My favorite vendors here in Tangjia are all native Cantonese speakers, so it makes the task not only a bit easier, but a lot more fun. They get a kick out of my attempts to juggle the local accents and languages, and, really, so do I. I love laughing with people, even if it requires laughing at myself most of the time. =)

Since I began this new venture, more of the vendors at the open-air market have begun starting conversations with me. Most of these are simply more detailed forms of "Are you a student?" and "Buy my peaches!", but it feels like a big step to me that so many more people seem interested in interacting with me, not just staring and saying 好高! (Hao3 gao1! So tall!) Some of the conversations are of a slightly deeper form. Vendors know which foods I like (tomatoes, bell peppers, red onions, green onions, broccoli, eggplant, pumpkin, winter melon, cabbage, bok choy, ...) and which I do not (pig skin, dog meat, sweet breads, dried fish, pre-peeled vegetables...), and will tell me when they have something that I or my roommate have been looking for. For example, I got a cob of baby corn waved in my face the other day when one vendor got it back in stock. I bought the equivalent of about 10 cans of corn for less than a dollar without bargaining. (I generally do not bargain at the open-air market because the prices are pretty much standardized. However, my favorite vendors love to say (roughly), "It's 4.5 RMB a pound, but I'll give it to you for 4 RMB a pound." I assume that every vendor will say the same thing, but it feels nice to thank them for their generosity.
Some vendors really are generous in various ways. Some are giving, like the fruit vendor who gives me a handful of miniature citrus fruits every time I walk by. Others go out of their way to make sure I am not being ripped off. My favorite vegetable vendor, a stout lady who sits atop her counter with a kind of pride I adore, will take the bags of fruit I have purchased before arriving at her station, weigh them, and ask how much I paid for them. She is always surprised by how cheap my fruits are, so I think she may stop doing that soon.
All of this was actually inspired by my wanting to tell a story of one of the Cantonese vendors who started talking to me recently due to my new linguistic exploits. She is a shrimp monger. My fear of my shrimp allergy has grown rapidly since last year, when I broke out into a full-blown hive attack that would not be calmed even by an anti-histamine overdose and standing in the freezing cold air outside. In China, if that kind of inflammatory response affected my throat the way that it did my skin last Christmas, I am pretty sure I would be dead. There is no way I would get proper medical attention in time. So, yeah, I don't really want to come in contact with the seafood that this region is famous for. Shrimp is in everything, but I think it is only fresh shrimp that causes major reactions, and fresh shrimp is much easier to avoid than dried shrimp... unless a shrimp monger begins to chase me with a live shrimp in hand screeching "好吃！Tasty!"

This is a picture I took the first day I walked through the open-air market... so long ago...

The funniest thing about being chased with a shrimp directed right at me is that the way she held the shrimp made that one shrimp simultaneously the scariest and cutest shrimp of all time. It practically made puppy eyes at me, at which I would have cooed if its flipping tail were not threatening to spray me with instant death (or, at least, extreme discomfort).
This same saleswoman came up to me three days later to inform me that it is, in fact, winter; hence, I should be wearing something more than a tank top and jeans. To demonstrate to me where I should add more layers of clothing, she rubbed her wet rubber fish-handling gloves down the back of my left arm. The vegetable vendor from whom I was purchasing sweet red peppers and cilantro shooed the fish woman away and kindly tried to dry my arms with her sweater sleeve. Each of them was genuinely well-intended towards me, but, I must admit, it was the vegetable vendor's way of expressing her kindness that I appreciated more.
I would have been curious to see if my skin would have broken out from direct contact with shrimp water, but the vendor was only selling scaly fish that day, so my question remains contendedly unanswered.

Fruit

So, apparently, my "hairless kiwi" was a sapodilla ~ originally from my side of the world according to Wikipedia. And the woman who told me how to pronounce it in the loud market was not saying 眼心果 "yan xin guo" like I thought. She was saying 人心果 "ren xin guo," which means "person heart fruit." When she was "pointing to her eye" according to my previous interpretation, she was actually just pointing to herself (a person...). Anywho, these are delicious!! Thanks to Steph providing that Top 10 Exotic Fruits site, I can now ask for just the fruit I want at the market! (These were listed in "10 More Exotic Fruits", a continuation of the page Steph sent.)

Some other fruits I have tried in the past month:
Santols (仙都果; xian1 du1 guo3) are a rare find right now, but are fun fruits to try to eat. The seed doesn't like to give up its meat easily, so one must play with it for a while. As someone who likes very much to eat while I cook, I would want one of these fruits on hand if I had to abstain from taste-testing before a meal. I would be able to keep my mouth occupied for a good fifteen minutes while cooking, and not suffer the taste-bud destruction/distraction that would result from chewing gum or brushing my teeth (which are, when necessary, reasonable techniques to counter taste-testing temptations).

Rose apples (I could only find the scientific name in Chinese: 蒲桃 pu2 tao2) are of a deeper red hue here in Zhuhai than in the picture above. The first time I saw them from across a room, I thought they were deformed red delicious apples (romantic, eh?). They are almost the size and shape of long red delicious apples, but their petal-like heads curl back into a small basin at their heads, and their waxy skins and crispy interiors are very reminiscent of star fruits. They were cooler to look at than they were tasty to eat, though.

Sugar apples (番荔枝; fan1 li4 zhi1) are exceptional. They are sweet and tangy and offer a sense of complete satisfaction that juicier fruits do not. Eating one of these is more like eating a sweet potato than a fruit in that, despite its sweetness, its heartiness warrants the kind of respect given to entrees and side dishes over snacks and desserts.

(I got the photos in this entry from here and here.)

I should have taken pictures of those other fruits before I ate them.
One actually look more like a long hairless kiwi covered in red dirt. The other was as I described -- tiny, crunchy, pickled mango-like things. Pictured above are my two bowls of tomatoes. Nothing special except that, altogether, with matching bowls and all, this setup cost less than $2. There is something nice about living in China right after graduating from college. It makes you feel like you can afford to live a little =)

And this is a picture of my chopstick-in-a-bottle victory. More about that when I don't need to rush to class.

Macau

(The man behind the camera is Serge. The other person in the photo? That would be me with my backpack slung on one shoulder, happy and warm in my Jean Paul sweater, not yet overheated as I would be for the rest of the day until my return home at 5pm).

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I finally went to Macau!
I headed out earlyish this morning with Serge with hopes of finding a Portuguese wine and some taco seasonings. I may or may not have purchased the wine I was hoping for, and there was no sign of taco seasonings anywhere I shopped. However, I was given a free kiddie-sized box of mini-cigars (does that make them cigarettes or not?) for telling a woman that the medicine she was taking (a glucosamine chondroitin complex) would help her bones (I couldn't find the Chinese word in my quick-dictionary for joints). She was disappointed by this news since she had been taking it to make her arms slimmer. She asked me to evaluate a second package of drugs, but I did not recognize the name at all, nor do I remember it now. I also found Butterscotch Schnapps, which I had to buy in memory of one fabulous (and relatively sober) night I had with Kate back at Miami. I haven't opened this bottle yet, but, if it is anything like the last one I tried, then I can claim that this bottle is where good sugar goes to when it dies (i.e., heaven).
My favorite picture from this outing: of a sign that read "Medicines No Fakes" to indicate that it was not just any drug store below the sign, but one of those drug stores that sells real medicine. I do love being in a place where that distinction seems necessary.
Serge and I also took a moment to capture on film some of the cuter streets and examples of Sino-Portuguese architectural achievements.


In the midst of those, Serge managed to photograph himself photographing me in a reflection that neither of us noticed (I think) before taking the pic. Hence the photo at the beginning of this entry.

I went shopping in Gongbei (a section of Zhuhai) after our excursion to Macau. My shopping adventures in Macau and Gongbei yielded new fruits that I still cannot identify. One type looked like they were small, pointy mangoes cover in a red powder; the vendor called then "yan xin guo" -- which sounds like "eye heart fruit". I cannot find anything by that name online. I know I have the right pronunciation, though, because she pointed to her eye, then her heart, and finally the fruit as she repeated the name of the fruit for me a fourth time (after I had called it "gan xin guo", "wan xin guo", and "yang xin guo" in my attempts to repeat after her).
The other fruits look like miniature mangoes of a brilliantly yellow hue. The package labels these as 腰芒 (yaomang -- which shares characters with both cashew and mango), but, again, I have not had much luck finding this on the internet -- at least, not on a site that can explain what they are. My taste test indicates that they probably are a form of pickled baby mangoes, but I don't know... The other fruits -- the red ones -- also taste a bit salty, so I wonder if the "yan" part of their name means salt rather than eye (same pronunciation). I dunno, but I have grading to do, so I do not have time to wonder much.