Wet market

My husband Faisal relocated to Singapore two months before us but he never went to the wet market (infact, he still hasn't visited one....). He used to do all the shopping from the Fairprice supermarket.

But I always like buying vegetables and meat from the wet market.So after I came I called up my friend Neelum to ask her where the nearest wet market was. She gave me the directions and I was very excited to go to a wet market in the city for the first time.

After reaching the "Shunfu Mart" very easily (it is hard to miss it in Shunfu road) the first thing that captured my attention was the fish stall. Being a bengali, fish is an important part of our diet and so I rushed to the stall to find out what types of fish were available. To my bewilderment none of the fish that I saw there looked familiar. We are used to fresh water fish and the fish that were in front of me were all sea fish. To add to my confusion the woman selling the fish was not fluent in English. So she could not tell me the english names of the fish except for the very obvious ones such as Pomfret (which is very expensive) and Salmon. I was not too keen on the Salmon and so I picked up a fish that kind of looked interesting to me. What I liked was the red hue over its body. I just hoped that it would be palatable.

Next I went towards the chicken shop. There I saw something I never saw before: black chicken. Not that it was a live chicken with black feathers but it was a dressed chicken and the skin was black....I asked the shopkeeper what it was. But he just answered, "It is black chicken, la." Till today I haven't been able to unravel the mystery behind the black chicken......

As I wandered through the other shops I saw that there was an amazing variety of mushrooms....I think I never saw such a great variety of mushrooms in my life. One unique type of mushroom that I saw were tiny white mushrooms joined at the base and they almost look like beansprouts (I later learned that it is called "Enoki"). In the vegetable sections most of the vegetables were familiar to me except the leafy greens. I just picked up one variety that looked good and hoped that it would be tasty. The beansprouts looked were very big and fresh. Back home the beansprouts are much smaller.

I wanted to linger on and explore but since my two kids were at home I decided to go back. My exploration is still on six months down the line and I must say that, though I miss Bangladeshi fish, on the whole I am having a nice time trying out unfamiliar seafood and vegetables.