Lets Take a Walk

Leaving the hotel in Gongshan, I look up at an old woman gaping down from her balcony, resembling a bobaloop of sorts in her thick pillowed silk turban. I wish her thoughts would penetrate my conscious as I regain my focus to the steps below. Descending into the daily market street, the sights are now becoming as common to my eye as my alarm clock. Every cube of business greets its customers with the same raised garage door releasing a few lucrative products out into the street. The filmstrip of stores lining the streets goes something like this…first the common market furnished with your choice of double mint gum, cigarettes, Sprite, Pepsi, water, RedBull (god they are an incredible company) or a surprisingly delightful nutrient milk containing Melamine (kidney stones beware). Open air produce markets sprawl from every alleyway flourishing with peeling oranges, surprisingly bland bananas, delicious crunchy apples, dwarfed watermelons (perhaps the size of a healthy watermelon without the help of artificial growth hormones) and more mysterious fruits of various colors and shapes only found in these nomadic marketplaces…….and of course, SUGAR CANE ☺, my guilty pleasure.

A stalk of sugar cane nearly as tall as me is merely 6 kuai (90 cents). The satisfaction of peeling this stalk is comparable to that of shucking crabs. I prepare my feast by carefully edging my knife blade into the taught husk, sliding down the length of the cane's heart until reaching the first growth notch, where a quick flick of the wrist releases the husk from the cane. Peeling the circumference, I begin to see the juices inside causing my mouth to water like a storm drain. I thumb the blade into the side, popping off a bite size chunk and grasping the morsel off the knife with my teeth, I roll it back toward the molars and clench down releasing the taste of sweet tropical esctacy into the potholes of tasebuds triggering a sugar smile from ear to ear. Yummmmmmm.

Now my psyche is in prime shape to continue my sugar shucking meander down the remainder of the marketplace. To my left is a barber shop with a brown tinsel floor composed of the prior day's clippings waiting to be be brushed into the street. Passing by shoestores and mini-markets ranging in products from hotplates and thermoses to dried and packaged animal parts that I have only seen in US petstores. Onward, the bakery lies inside its cube of commerce. Cookies galore, all tasting the same, large colorful trays of rolled cakes, all tasting the same, muffins as plain as my description, but the banana bread….flourishing with flavor, every bite reminding me of grandma's baking. I buy extra pieces (pian) but soon the secret is out and our group cleans out every bakery in town of their precious banana bread. They refill the next day. Before long, when an American walks into a bakery, the pre-teen clerk is already putting banana bread into a bag, I now giggle and order something else to preserve my individuality.
Continuing on is the plumber's shop hawking faucets, sinks, hoses and the infamous pearl “browninghole.” This piece of dim-witted Chinese engineering is merely a glorified porcelain bowl that turns your rectal experience into more of a golf game! Choice in style and color does not exist. At least they furnish footgrips on the side of these porcelain contraptions to keep you from loosing traction on your back swing.
Another piece of sugar cane in the system, passing by restaurant row I glance at ankle height stools as wide as a personal pan pizza surrounding the tables. The list of ingredients available are physically displayed in a lighted case: greens, greens, and more greens, meat….mostly pork in all of its glorious forms, organs included. How they turn this array of goulash into palatable meals is beyond me. Mechanic shops, more efficient than a Wal-Mart tire center, do all their repairs on the side of the street. Garages are a luxury reserved for more developed countries, apparently. Tool shops with used tools, another common store, another shoe store, the picture repeats itself as I reach the staircase leading me down the landfill hillside to my day's resting spot on the river.
Returning in the evening, the alley-way markets have unloaded their fruits of labor and the color blends brown again as the wagon coach of farmers begin to trolley their wooded carts out into the streets, then disperse like mice ino the vast network of trails leading back to the the mountain villiages where they will gather for tomorrow's storefront. Heading up the steps back into the hotel, I look back at the settled street as the departed colors leave the gray solidity to blend back into the concrete jungle.

Ironically enough, just as I wrote those last words the Bob Marley song "Concrete Jungle" shuffled into play on my I-pod. I am on the bus Mr. Keasey, my bus that is.