After looking at the food in the market with a view to choosing ingredients for a hypothetical meal, now I just looked for interesting items for sale that are not so common at home.

These were unusual… twisted, squat, knobbly baby pumpkins.

A popular food in Asia… bamboo shoots, for sale here both trimmed and untrimmed.

Beautifully coloured Okinawan spinach (?Guan Yin Cai); Gynura crepioides

Pink mushrooms? No. Not really. Just the light through pink shade cloth!

Live baby tortoise! I must say, it’s difficult to think of eating these.

Now here’s a worry.. prawns, not cooked, not on ice… and no sea anywhere near!

Dried ‘butterflied’ ducks… heads down, tails up… not sure how to prepare these.

Chicken feet and chillies… a popular dish. Nothing wasted here.

I most certainly was NOT ready to try these eggs known variously as Century Eggs, Thousand Year Old or Preserved eggs.  They are prepared by wrapping the eggs in a mix of clay, straw, ash, salt and lime (powder) and buried for ‘months’. Not for me… but a delicacy in China.

A sausage could be interesting. Wonder what’s in them?

On the other hand, I could be tempted by freshly cooked, wholemeal flour, pork buns!

More buns waiting to be steamed.

Chestnuts were in season… not my favourite nut.

But these… walnuts straight from tree to buyer… oh yes.

By now we were getting a little weary… but at least we weren’t sleep walking!

But it was time to buy something to take home for dinner… maybe tomatoes? Vine ripened, fresh picked… tomatoes that taste like tomatoes should taste. Not the tough skinned varieties in our supermarkets that are so ‘travel prepared’ that they bounce like a ball… and need salt for taste.

In the end, we settled for asparagus… again fresh picked by hand.

Fresh asparagus in hand, we went back to the apartment where Kenzo cooked up a storm for dinner… left-over duck from the night before with kidney beans and the asparagus, all washed down with millet soup and a bottle of wine… and an enjoyable view from the apartment at dusk.

I woke to a pleasant morning, 21⁰C (70⁰F) but, on this one, I had to return to Beijing and leave behind a couple of really good friends.  I’d very much enjoyed my time with Kenzo in Jianshui and wish that Ross could have joined us.  Apart from Kenzo’s company, I think I enjoyed Jianshui so much because it took me to a place that I knew absolutely nothing about.  It was a new adventure, every thing was new… except the old village.  It was not far removed from the way it must have been many hundreds of years ago.  Brilliant!

And, Kunming, well, I’d been there before, some 16 years ago, but it had changed so much that I didn’t recognise a thing.  Hopefully, it won’t be another 16 years before I return.

And, hopefully it won’t be too long before I return to share more of my explorations to parts of our amazing world not yet on the general tourist trail. Nothing booked at the moment though…

Until then, Jennie will be adding more of our travel posts on our other site:

www.jtdytravels.com

Do join us there for more armchair travels

or revisit the places on this blog.

David

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