The Markets

Normally Friday is a review day for home schooling, so it’s pretty slack, but today we were making up for missing some of our lessons during our busy week. We got all that out of the way in the morning and headed off to the markets and more in the afternoon.

We are in a perfect location for the markets. We walked up our street a little way to the Goldfish Market. There they sell aquariums and fish of all sorts. We saw goldfish that had bags under their eyes. It looked like they were carrying around balloons on their faces! We saw some beautiful Beta fish with fins that were longer and shaped differently then what I’ve seen back home. There was also some other animals like hamsters, rabbits, puppies and kittens, but mostly fish. Who needs a zoo?


A little farther up from the Goldfish Market is the Flower Market. They had all sorts of flowers including every type of orchid imaginable. The smell was so fresh! We stopped at a bakery and picked up some lunch. We had little rolls that had ham and cheese backed into the middle and pizzas that had corn as a one of the toppings and another roll that had a mini sausage, kind of like a hot dog baked into it.

From there we found the Bird Garden where they have all sorts of little birds and big birds too. They also had some pretty ornate cages. It was funny because they were all squawking and screeching and making quite a commotion.

We then decided to head back towards the hotel to the nearby Ladies’ Market. You don’t buy ladies there, but there is a lot of women’s clothing, wall hangings, accessories, pillows, belts, and tons more. We did a little haggling, but weren’t so motivated to buy so we came away with only a couple of Chinese outfits for Barbie! The girls couldn’t wait to go back and play.

We grabbed the subway down to the harbour and took a tour of the city with Star Ferry. It was a cloudy day, still quite warm, but bearable. We opted to stay at the bow of the ferry outside in the breeze rather than go in for the air conditioning. Once again we marvelled at Hong Kong and it’s thousands of sky scrapers.

We’re off to Hanoi tomorrow. I think we’ll be glad to be out of the mega cities for a little while. Hopefully Vietnam will be a nice break from it.

CM