China Part 8 – Living in Changzhou

While my family went touring around some cities and a mountain for 4 days I stayed in Changzhou with Hong’s Mom and Aunt. My first adventure was to visit the Chinese Traditional Medicine doctor after getting sick from the dumplings. I took a picture of the hospital entrance. There were a lot of people all over the hospital and even in the ‘exam’ rooms.

I also went to the pharmacy to get my herbal mixture and was allowed in the back to take some pictures. The nurses here were just busy all day filling ‘prescriptions’ by putting different herbs into brown paper bags. Looks kinda different from a Western pharmacy.

Once I was feeling better enough we went to the local fresh market. I got to ride the bus with Min and everyone stared at me. This wasn’t exactly a tourist location so most locals had never seen a white person before.

The local fresh market was wonderful to visit. This type of market would probably not be allowed in Canada. Most of the seafood was still alive (or half dead anyway)

None of the meat was refrigerated. Everyone handled the food with ‘gasp’ bare hands. It was great. Finally people who weren’t scared of real food. There were endless rows of everything fresh including (left to right, top row first): honey!, meat, tofu, vegetables, mushrooms, fruits. The meat guy is actually chopping up a whole ox tail for me 🙂 I made a delicious, healing ox tail soup out of it. Most of this food is local, with mainly the fruits shipped in.

As nice as the fresh market was, I asked to go to a supermarket for something special. I terribly missed my SCD foods and most of all my yogurt. So I thought, why not try and make it. They don’t have any dairy at the fresh market so we went to RT Mart.

It felt like a giant fluorescent colored Walmart with just about any boxed food you can imagine. Rice comes in huge bulk bins. They sell all kinds of booze in there too. Quite the contrast from the fresh market. I was happy to note that the fresh market was cheaper and busier, while the RT-Mart seemed the less popular choice.

They did have lots of dairy products and I did make yogurt successfully. I’ll post about that later.

After some clothes shopping, we visited Hong’s childhood home which Min is standing in front of here. Unfortunately no one was home at the time so we didn’t go in. It was pretty neat to see what a difference this home was from their current home in Canada.

At some point along one of the streets we saw this old fashioned popcorn maker. Hong still remembers getting some as a kid.

This post was part of Food Renegade’s Fight Back Fridays! and Health Food Lover’s Wholesome Whole Foods blog carnivals. Just wanted to share what a Real Food market looks like in China.