Wandering in Xiamen Morning Market 廈門逛菜市

I came to Xiamen for a short meeting few days ago. My colleague and I found ourselves rather unsatisfied as we spent most of our time in the Sofitel. It might have been the best hotel within Xiamen for the last two years, but most of us would agree that international chain hotel generally have very little local flavors offered. It is not surprising that we were actually fed poorly by the hotel cafe, be it the morning buffet breakfast or the lunch and gala dinner later on.

We had a whole morning free on our last day prior our flight back to KL. Lew, my colleague suggested that we could take a peek at the local life and the best place for that would be at the local market!

Clever him too, that he thought about asking the tour guide on our city tour where we could find a wet market that is full of local flavor. The guide told us to go to Area No.8 market （第八區菜市場）. It is actually just nearby the Zhongshan Road shopping strip as well as the jetty to Gulang Island.

The next day, we quickly had simple breakfast in hope we could find something nice to eat at the market. Got on to the taxi and told him that we need to get to this market. He didn't seem too please why tourist like us would want to go to dirty wet smelly market.

When he dropped us off at this old looking area, the outer open air part of the market was already hustling and bustling from afar.

So many things on sale here. This market is very very well known for its live seafood trading. We caught glimpse of many unknown fishes, clams, shrimps, and even worm... Lew said he saw on tv before that these worms were actually made into seafood salad and taste like chicken feed kerabu. Hmmm... I don't know if I would eat that really.

Selling fresh seaweed. Lew says soup made with this taste pretty good

There are specialty stalls too...

Just selling bamboo shoots

And concentrade on mushrooms and nothing else.

Vegetables here are so cheap, pricing lingering on RMB 0.50 for like 1kg or so.

Lew and Kong ended up finding great quality dried scallops at RMB80/500g, they quickly bought some while I just continue lurking around like a genuine tourist.

Rare food source are found here for sure, sigh. Which includes Pigeon, frogs, rabbits, peasants, quils.

I like my duck meat, but not enough to see it killed right in front of my eye since it look beautiful like this. Hypocrite me... want the whole cake and not eat it.

Ok, these birds are not for food but for hobby use...

The main market was not that large, but it gets extend to the open air area right till alleys where local stays.

We wander all of this market trying to look for a decent place for seafood-on-the-spot but there is just none around. Even the steamed dimsums and roast duck was for take away. Nonetheless we really enjoyed our visit here, and that makes us remember Xiamen in its unique way rather than sterile tall buildings that looks the same everywhere in metropolitan China.