5 minutes away from our apartment is one of the permanent established wet markets called Chợ Châu Long, taking it’s name from the street where it resides.  We’ve heard that grocery stores are starting to appear around Hanoi, but we haven’t seen them and most people still use the wet markets.  These markets have everything food-related, except fruit, which is sold outside the market from bicycle vendors. Just-butchered meats, offal, birds, seafood, frogs, all shapes and kinds of eggs (fertilized, goose, chicken, quail) fresh tofu made that morning, rice, sausages, pastes, patties, vegetables, herbs, spices and layers upon layers of fresh noodles.  It’s all available and all for sale.  The only priced items we saw were the rices.  The numbers here are 1000 VND per kilogram.  (1 kg of Tám Thai = 2.2 lbs = 18,000 VND = 80 cents)

See the shrine?  They’re everywhere.  The market wouldn’t be complete without a small shrine and the daily offerings and burning incense.

The market looks messy but is in fact totally organized.  With all the meat and fish laying around you’d expect to smell a certain aroma.  But no.  It’s a good smell (except for the scooter exhaust.)  The meat is fresh and sells quickly.  The fish, seafood, frogs, snails, clams and prawns are all kept alive until sold.  It’s impressive.  The tables and aisles get hosed down every night in prep for the next day, hence the name.  Super crowded every morning (scooters!  people drive their scooters in here!), it slows down mid-day after the meat and fish are sold and packed away.  Nap-time rolls around every day from 12-2, so most vendors cover up and rest, or hang in a hammock, or pull out a cot, while others played cards with each other.  If we time it right, we might be able to see what card game they were playing.

 

 

Skinning the frogs.  Wow, she was swift.

 

 

These banana-leaf wrapped bundles are appearing everywhere the closer it gets to Tet.  Modern folks are getting too busy to make them at home (it’s a 2-day process) so they’re buying them instead.  Bánh chưng.  Rice cakes for Tet.  The story goes that there was a family competition for their father’s throne.  The winner was the quiet, youngest son who created banh chưng based upon a dream he had.  In his dream, a genie had told him to take sticky rice (which symbolized earth), wrap it around a ball of mung bean paste (which represented the sun), wrap it in a square shape (at that time the ground/earth was thought to be square) then boil it for one day and one night.

The longer we’re here, the more we hope to figure out how to use all the interesting and unknown market products.  The vendors are friendly and willing to share their knowledge.  The weak link is our language ability.  We’re working on it.  Meanwhile, we’ll be getting some bánh chưng soon.