Vegetarians... Skip this piece!

This is a continuation of my RTW diary from November 2003

On the last day, I realised I still hadn’t spent any time in Kowloon, so I stayed on the mainland and spent an afternoon wandering round the markets there.

Kowloon had all of the benefits of Hong Kong Island – really friendly people; most people speaking excellent English; as well as feeling much less European.

There were gardens full of elderly people enjoying the sun and chatting away, as opposed to the gardens in Central all full of city traders and suited businesspeople. The high rise buildings were homes and local businesses rather than being home to international banks. The markets offered local produce, not Boss shirts and Mont Blanc pens.

I spent a fascinating afternoon haggling over pieces of jade in the Jade Bazaar; tasting slices of fruit and munching away on fresh fruit I’d never seen before as I wandered through the vegetables and then we came on the fish market… Vegetarians should skip the rest of this blog. No. I really mean it!

One minute I'm surrounded by the worlds largest oranges, and a left turn later I'm in amongst the seafood. Now I was in Stockholm a few years ago and came across the fish market there. As a big fan of eating fish, I was actually kind of interested in seeing what the fish actually look like (I’ve been put off Monkfish for example) and getting an idea of what food costs to buy to cook. Well the Kowloon fish market was a real eye opener and very different to the iced produce of Sweden.

At first I thought I had made a mistake when out of the corner of my eye I saw a prawn jump out of its crate. Especially as I stared at the crate again and nothing moved. I thought to myself ‘that’s the last malaria tablet you’re taking!’ and moved on.

And then two fish in front of me both seemed to sit up and then laid down again… “Are these fish alive?”. “yes”, came the reassuring yet equally concerning response – at least I wasn’t imagining things!

The next stall I came to was a squirming scaly profusion of all things fishy, and all of it was alive! Gills flapping as the fish gasped for air; prawny legs wriggling away nineteen to the dozen; fishes trying to flip themselves back into the non-existent water; frustrated crab claws all tied up with string, these are a few of my tastiest things (as Julie Andrews might have sung had she been here).

Bad puns on the Sound of Music aside, once I twigged that all the fish were alive I suddenly realised that ALL the fish were ALIVE! It’s like that moment in a horror movie when the hero realises he has wandered too far into the forest and suddenly can’t see the lights of his car any more.

Now not all of these fish were hand-sized snappers. They had some big things caught too. There was a bucket of swordfish swords available for example, and then we came across the Tuna-mongers, and the two grossest things in the entire market…

Tuna for those who haven’t seen a real one (and I never had until Kowloon) are big fish – can be as big as a human thigh – can be bigger. Tuna steaks are a cross section of the fish and mighty tasty they are too – grilled rare, pan fried, poached or raw on sushi I love it all. I was actually less unnerved by what I saw in Kowloon than I expected at the time and since.

Anyway, what did I see? Well on stall number one was a guy chopping cross section tuna steaks from a tuna body. Nothing there to concern my nervous stomach. Or so I thought until I looked again at the counter and there was the separated head of the tuna, totally cut off from the body and left on a plate at the front of the stall, gills suffused with blood still heaving away trying to breath! It was as if he was calling business to the stall! It was the size of a balloon and this head just kept inflating and deflating away as if it really didn’t understand or realise that it had lost its body.

The next stall took this to another level however. There was the monger carving the steaks off. There was the head, gills bellowing away… but the two were still connected! The monger was carving off four steaks to the order of his customer, with the head still alive and the fishes intestines just neatly pushed to one side of the chopping board. Talk about fresh fish! It was like that episode of The Simpsons where Homers power station is taken over by Germans and they tell him that Germany is ‘the land of chocolate’. Homer goes off into a trance, imagining the land of chocolate and wanders round munching lampposts and flowers and then picks up a hopping bunny, munches it and leaves it to hop away, teethmarks and all.

I had read that in some freshly prepared sushi bars in Japan, we could expect fish to be killed in front of us and the trick was to eat the flesh before the fish dies. Looking at those tuna I realised that this task, should it fall to us, wouldn’t be as difficult as the Lonely Planet made out!

And no I don’t have photographs, before you ask, I only carried the camera for one day in HK and it wasn’t that day!