Sea Turtles and Tigers and No Camera...Oh My!

I moseyed on down to the ji shi chang (that's the market/bazaar) today to pick up a couple of things. I've decided it's simply my most favourite part of Nanning. Its noisy and bustling with people, it smells of everything you can think of (good and bad) and I always come home toting some prized culinary item that I never expected to see in China for some ridiculously low price (comparatively speaking -- you'd probably fall off your chair thinking how cheap you can get that in the West). I enjoy the sense of accomplishment when I manage to get the laoban (shopkeeper) to knock a few yuan of the price. But despite this wonderful, dirty, hot and over-crowded building being my most favourite place in the whole of Nanning (despite having to constantly check my personal belongings to make sure they haven't been snitched) , somehow, everytime I go, I always forget to take my camera.

And today of all days, I am so bummed that I didn't bring the camera. It's fortunate that I took Jason with me today (my own personal pack horse but I tell him that he is shuai ge, which means he is a handsome pack horse...ah...man...so he doesn't mind...I think) or I'd have no one to back me up.

I found out where you go to get any kind of turtle you can dream of to eat for dinner -- including but not limited to the very endangered green sea turtle. He was 80 kuai yi jin (about $22 a kilo -- cheap they tell me).

I found out where I can get dried Thyme for 34 kuai (about $4.50) for a container (the cheapest I've found prior to this is 50 kuai) and fresh parsely! Haven't see that since I left the States!

I found a new people group! Well, I'm sure they were already found being that they were at the market but they were wearing clothes I hadn't see before and looked different from the Zhuang minority group which represents the largest minority group in Nanning...I was about to ask them where they were from when I realized what the guy was trying to sell me was...

...a tiger's foot. Yup. A real, fair dinkum leg of a tiger (from about the knee cap down...they knee cap still being attached, that is). Many thoughts rush through your head when someone holds a tiger's foot in front of you. Isn't that illegal...That tiger was once alive...this man actually killed a tiger (no doubt in my mind on that one)...poor tiger...poor village...where is the rest of the tiger...Mowgali and Sher Kan (wrong country I know)...my, what big feet that tiger had...are the police going to arrest me any minute for looking at this...are PETA going to come screaming around the corner with their clubs and pickets...is my husband really asking that guy how much the tigers foot costs...is he really bartering with that guy for one of the tiger claws...the answer to the later two thoughts was, yes. No he didn't buy it...mostly because I was protesting too much. But seriously now, can you guess how much one tiger claw was going for? This thing is at least 2" long (don't you love how I include both metric and imperial measurements?).

Ba kuai. That's a little over $1 USD.

I kept thinking how dreadfully sad this was, and I wondered if the tiger had any idea that his toenails where only worth 8 kuai each? Way to belittle the poor, dead, tiger. I wanted to ask where the rest of the tiger was, had he terrorized a village and who exactly were these people (other than poachers) but they took off after getting wind that the police where coming. Just as quickly had the tiger's leg been thrust in my face, it and all of that people group, had vanished leaving Jason and I gawking on the foot-path trying to remember what we'd actually come to the market for in the first place...