China Town

I LOVE China Town. There is the "main" street with all the tourist slog shops, still frequented by a zillion locals. Then there are the back streets that I adore. Butcher shops with roasted birds (chicken, quail, duck...all coated and dripping, some flat, some not) and huge 3 foot long and 12 inch wide stips of fried pork rinds, and chicken feet in all sorts of sauces. With the locals yelling their orders while the butchers hack the cooked fowl into pieces and place them in styrofoam boxes for the trip home. The fish mongers with live, dried, salted, and fresh fish...some I can identify...others not. The vegetable and fruit stands, where women jostle others out of the way to get their bags filled with the best and newest products. On my last visit, baby bokchoy was the prize. This time, a small fruit, which we watched on woman lift and give to her toddler, looking something like an oblong plum was the object of desire. I tried to find out what it was but could find no one who spoke English. All signage is in Chinese. What else? Oh, yes...the pharmacies...smelling old and dank and pungent with large glass jars of all sorts of dried roots and herbs. Can recognize various mushrooms, ginger and ginseng...but all else is unknown to me. There are the dry good shops with huge bags of dried mushrooms for just pennies, as well as dried fish, and huge baskets of what we finally determined to be dried sea scallops ranging from 18 to 50 dollars a pound depending on their size with the larger being the more expensive. I have no idea how they use them. I love the flavor and the mystery.