My Expat Life

Last night was a girl’s night out. I went out with the other ang moh girl at work, and the wife of one of the director’s. It was a great night. It was a late night. After the last pub closed we went back and sat around talking for a few hours. I arrived home and stumbled into bed about 5:30 am.

Luckily, today was the 4th beautiful day in a row (a rarity) and I was able to go down to the pool for some quality recovery in the sun.

After the pool time, I went to go get cable. I rarely, rarely watch tv anymore, but there are times I just need to veg on the sofa. There are times where I need to know what is going on in the world. There are times I need my sport. After weeks of looking for it, I’d given up on trying to watch American football, and resigned myself to watching just football and world cup rugby. Boy was I happy when I got my cable hooked up and found that ESPN was showing the UT/Rice game. Yeehaw. So now I sit and quality veg on the sofa flipping between the UT game and the Australia v Fiji world cup rugby match. Now this is how to recover from girl’s night.

On Sunday, my friend and neighbour, was hosting a bbq and he asked me to help him shop and such. He found the wet market nearest our neighbourhood, which is an awesome, awesome shopping experience. It’s totally what you expect of a fresh produce and meat market. The fish were just beautiful. The chicken and other meats were nice, fresh, natural colours, not the fake red that you see on the beef in supermarkets. And the fruit and veg was unbelievable.

I went to buy the fruit, as I consider myself a fruit expert. You walk up to the booth and they don’t let you touch. You tell them what you want and then they qualify. So for mangoes, I had to determine if I wanted fresh to eat that day, 1 day later or later in the week. That done I had to decide if I wanted fragrant or non-fragrant. For pears, I had 3 choices of firmness as well as ripeness. For all this service and freshness, I paid about half of what you pay in the supermarket. The ones that were supposed to be ripe that day, were some of the best fruits I’ve ever tasted. The mangoes were inhaled by the bbq attendees. The peel and the pit were the only signs that they even existed (unless you count the cut on my thumb from playing fast and loose with the knife).

For the vegetables, we were given baskets and plastic bags. You load up as much veg as you want in the bag and place it in your basket. Once you’ve filled your basket(s), you hand them over to be weighed and charged.

Know you want watercress, but not sure what it looks like? Just ask, and they point. Need cucumbers, choose between 3 different varieties. Pay 1/3 of what you pay in the supermarket.

What do you get when it’s all put together? A girl that has eaten maybe half a dozen salads in my lifetime, having 2-3 servings of each salad on Sunday and then going back over to my friend’s apartment on Monday night to gladly eat another large plateful of leftover salads for dinner. Sadly there was no fish or prawns leftover. And still sadder, is there was no leftover salad after last night that I could steal for today’s lunch or dinner. I have learned to make the salads and I will be back to the wet market, and I will be eating rocket (arugula), feta, smoked salmon, avocado, and walnut salad again. Oh yes!