Wan Chai Market is about a 15 minute walk from our guest flat. We went there to buy some groceries. All you have to do is cross a somewhat busy street, walk down a hillside on some rickety stairs, walk about 1/4 mile down Kennedy, ride an elevator from the 17th floor of the Hopewell Center, and across the packed streets to a side street that would be ignored in the States. Not this side street though. It was packed with stores and people. After a ten minute walk through the shopping – mostly due to the slow-moving pedestrian traffic that is filing past all the shops – you will find the Wan Chai Market. It’s an indoor open-air market with separate stalls of produce, meat, and fish. We tried to photograph it, but Josh got shooed away by one stall keeper who apparently doesn’t want to be on the cover of our blog.
These roasted ducks were a steal at 90HKD ($11.55) per duck or just 45HKD ($5.78) for a half-duck. Awkwardly, I asked the teller to sell me half of a duck and chop it up. I need to learn the words “duck” and “half.” Fortunately, someone there spoke enough English to give me a styrofoam container of chopped duck. I am not really sure how the halved the duck because I received one wing nub, one webbed foot, an half of its head. I cooked a pot of congee, rice porridge, and added most of the bony bits, the head, the foot, and the wing to the cooking rice. It imparts a salty and flavorsome taste to the rice broth.
The duck also came with two resealable zipper bags of mystery sauces.
You can buy produce and clothing in the same market
These orange trees are for fortune for the New Year
A flat, dried up chicken with its coxcomb in place?
Dried Chinese sausage is sweet, salty, greasy, and oh, so good!
Dried, roasted pork belly
On the right – dried chicken?
REALLY fresh fish – some of the whole fish were still flopping around, and one of the fileted fish was still breathing. Oy
All sorts of fresh fish were available. I haven’t seen such bright, clear, fresh fish, even at the Pike Place Market. And no, none of them were packed in ice. There may have been some ice and cold water on the tarps upon which they laid.
Some sort of flippered turtle
Pork snout and the essential “varietal meats”
The cucumbers were furry
Yah, its tongue is sticking out. I have no idea who buys a cow (?) head or how one would prepare it, but it does show that the meat is fresh…
Super fresh shrimp. All of the shrimp we saw were in their shells and still moving around. No tail on, IQF shrimp here!
I remember walking down Wan Chai market with my mom almost every week. She always went to the same vendor, he would sell my mom frozen chicken for ridiculously cheap because of course who on earth but my mom would choose frozen chicken over a freshly killed chicken. Such a fun childhood experience, although at times I thought some of the animals were being sold as pets, never understood why my mom wouldn't buy me a pet. 🙂
You know, the freshly killed chickens are harder to find, now that there are more restrictions that resulted from the Avian flu epidemic. You can still find them. My aunt took us to one. I'll post some of the pictures from that pretty soon. Thanks for reading and writing Laura!