Old Hangzhou

Near our fantastic hostel in Hangzhou, was an older portion of the city where many older locals still resided. As we meandered through the area, we actually found a small food market area where all the locals go daily to shop for fresh vegetables, fruit and other edible items for that's day meals.

Whenever I travel, I love to browse around the local food markets. Markets always are the best place to observe the local life, so I was happy that we found one by accident in Hangzhou.

The market that we ran into in Hangzhou was half indoors and half outdoors. At this market, you could find anything you might need to make a meal--vegetables, fruit, meat, dried goods, spices, fish and live poultry.

Yes, I said live poultry. Chinese people like to get their food as fresh as possible, meaning it's best if you actually met the chicken you're going to eat while it's still alive. Much of the fish being sold as well at the market was also still swimming.

For me, coming from my Chinese background seeing all the live poultry and fish didn't really bother me. After all, this is basically the way it's been done for years in China and in the US, my parents still prefer to buy live fish as opposed to frozen fish to cook.

But for Leslie, I think she might have been a bit startled to see just how much freshness really mattered to Chinese home cooks. She was also quite interested to see the vendors selling all the different soy products from tofu to bean curd sheets to dried tofu.What can I say? Tofu is really what cheese is like to the West. While cheese in the West comes in many shapes in sizes, in China, the tofu possibilities are seemingly endless.

Pictures from the older part of Hangzhou shall now commence forth, including one of (the woman we dubbed as) the tofu lady.

 

Tofu lady

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