Author: tanjingymin

Well, well, well, if it isn’t the oldest, most storied, most featured-in-popular-media market in Seoul. Earlier in 2024, a dear friend from university invited me to her wedding on Christmas day, in her home country. Several months later, a dear friend from work announced her wedding, just two days after, in Singapore. After processing that shuttling between weddings will probably be my life for the next 10 years, I looked up flights to Incheon Airport, and concluded that a 3.5-day sprint through Seoul was in order. Which returns me to my initial statement — I had time for one market trip, and I wanted it to be good.

A Korean friend in Singapore effusively exhorted the delights of Gwangjang Market to me. I didn’t need convincing. The sprawling city of Seoul is literally littered with markets — a quick skim of Google Maps illustrates that there must be a market or two within any 5km radius in the city. There are markets that specialise in every type of product imaginable: traditional herbs, clothing, electronics, artist’s markets, flea markets, seafood, toys. Seoul is quite literally a market-lover’s paradise. And upon arrival in the city, that fact is made even more apparent: at every turn, towering shopping malls sprout from the ground like prolific crop fields ripe for harvest. The streets are dotted with flights of subway staircases that lead to – you guessed it – underground shopping malls.

Gwangjang Market itself is situated in a major area of commerce. It is surrounded by: Bangsan Market (baking and craft materials), Jungbu Dried Seafoods Market, Pyounghwa Market (secondhand clothes and books), Dongdaemun General Market (an air-conditioned market for clothing and textiles), and Namdaemun Market (household items), and not to mention the famous Myeongdong shopping area. Just looking at the map is overstimulating.

I visit Gwangjang not once, but twice. The first time, my traveling companions and I come in search of dinner. We draw close to the Netflix ajumma offering kalguksu and mandus like flies to a lamplight on a moonless night. My friends are avid Netflix watchers, and this was on their Seoul must-hit list. She’s there in a pink apron, a headscarf holding her greying hair back, bright red lipstick adorning her otherwise bare face. She is non-stop. We perch on electrically warmed benches (so cozy!) arranged around the steaming engine of this culinary hotspot and watch her slice noodles, dunk them into boiling pots of water, and occasionally grace an excited customer-fan (us included) with a quick grin or a photo. My friend calls her attention to us, keys in a message of respect to Google Translate, and hits play for the technology to express our admiration in Korean. She laughs unabashedly, clearly no stranger to these occurrences.

Bowls of kalguksu and platters of kimchi and pork mandus all around, accompanied by dishes of Korean soy sauce with massive slices of scallions, which is more delicate and sweet than its Chinese relative. A bottle of soju to share, for good measure. The food was preceded by ubiquitous little plates of kimchi. The kalguksu broth was clean and sweet; the noodles rough-cut, chewy and robust, like udon’s rustic cousin. The mandus – well, what has been said in the history of food that has not been said about dumplings? The mandus were ingots of juicy, umami goodness. They were pure pleasure.

After the fortifying meal (and a polaroid with the ajumma), we stalk off in a nameless quest for amusement.

If one visits markets often enough, one begins to notice patterns. Like Pasir Panjang Wholesale Market, the main street in Gwangjang Market is a bustling thoroughfare, except instead of cardboard boxes of vegetables, there are two parallel rows of open-concept food stalls, jockeying for the attention of locals and tourists alike. They carry much of the same types of foods — mayak kimbap (crack kimbap – it’s called that because it’s so addictive), bindatteok (pan-fried mung bean pancake), tteokbokki. There is more exotic fare: soondae (pig intestines filled with noodles, barley, and pork blood), pig trotters, seasoned raw beef. On either side of these two rows of food stalls, there are larger restaurants in more permanent spaces; outside each one, the service staff stand sentinel, ready to welcome a potential customer at the slightest hint of a second glance.

At the North gate, a queue snakes onto the main road for sought-after twisted donuts (I go for some hotteok from a less popular stall instead. I fall in love). I buy some yakgwa (a delicious oil-and-honey cake that has the texture of a really dense brownie) and seaweed crackers, and the night ends there. My friends and I are tired and the market is winding down for the night. But all those delicacies remain untried, and I know I must return.

Two days later, I do. Wedding festivities have come and gone. The morning is brilliantly bright and bitterly cold. I am fighting an excruciating throat ulcer. Armed with throat spray and painkillers, a friend and I make our way to Jongno district again. The market adventure begins before we reach Gwangjang. We pop in and out of curiosities along the street: a record shop, a vegetable shop, a temple with a koi fish frozen solid in its shallow pond. Even before we get to the market, my arms are already laden with plastic bags — one has a carton of dried persimmons, another contains an LP.

When we reach Gwangjang Market, the day’s hubbub is already in full swing. Time cannot be wasted, especially since my flight back to Singapore was in the evening that day. We plunge into the maze-like market sprawl.

The main street is a rushing river branching out to specialised tributaries. One alleyway peddles exquisite Korean quilted textiles, another a row of fine tailors, yet another is lined with shops offering exclusively beef tartare. Queues of dried mackerel hang from the ceiling of one shop; a group of aunties sit outside their seafood shop scaling fish; plastic-wrapped bowls of crab marinate in soy sauce at another stall.

Having done a bit of Googling, I realised that Gwangjang Market is a bit of a tourist attraction, especially after it’d been featured on Netflix. That said, there are glimpses of local life everywhere one looks: in the butcher’s child left to play alone while the adults do the accounting, the fernbrakes (gosari) used to make banchan, the solitary man having his first meal of the day. I enjoy those sights as much as the whimsical ones for the tourists.

Often, I set out to markets in search of authenticity, whatever that means. I’ve been trained by my parents to chase after a type of travel that’s off the beaten path, for the locals. I think the heart of that elusive quest is the disavowal of commercialisation of a culture, which is well and good, for I am as skeptical of neoliberal capitalism as the next woke young thing. Of course, nobody likes to be ripped off or taken for a fool. But to delimit the authentic from the inauthentic, dismissing one body of experience as touristy, may end up impoverishing the way we encounter the unfamiliar. This world is ripe for experiencing. Whether previously featured on Netflix or not, the first bite is assuredly still as succulent.

Before my bumbling work friends and I set off for a weekend trip to Bangalore to attend our friend’s wedding, we were given strict instructions by worried seniors and bosses: (1) do not leave the hotel, (2) do not go anywhere alone. I think of rules as advisories. Bangalore is a collision of relatively new affluence in India’s self-proclaimed Silicon Valley and rich ancient and modern history — a city new to me, and its vibrance was ripe for the taking. I couldn’t help myself. On a visit to a staid air-conditioned shopping mall, I wheedled my way with our group of risk-averse Singaporean travellers, repeating the question, “Is anyone feeling…adventurous?” I knew, between a jam-packed itinerary of dances, banquets and dressing up, I had to find the messiest, most colourful market this throbbing city had to offer.

I make cross-references across several internet listicles and triangulate my location on Google Maps before deciding on the target location: KR Market. It’s short for Krishnarajendra, named for the 24th Maharaja of Mysore, who ruled in British India in 1902 – 1940. His gleaming legacy features all kinds of progressive reforms and state projects, from the abolishment of child marriage, the development of a local textile industry, to Asia’s first hydroelectric dam. He played eight instruments and founded two universities. I learn from the internet that KR Market is the largest flower market in Asia and the oldest market in Bangalore (it turned 100 in 2021). It’s going to be quite a sight, but it’s a piece of history, too.

To my absolute glee, I manage to find a fellow intrepid explorer. In the small hours of the next morning, we send each other text messages assuring the other that we are awake, last night’s 2am sangeet dancing still pumping in our blood. We convene, bleary-eyed, in the hotel lobby, pile into the waiting Uber, and silently watch the waking city from amidst the thickening traffic.

The original market building, a red-brick heritage structure, dates back to the 1800s. The market itself literally spills onto the street: an endless procession of two-legged people, two-wheeled vehicles and four-legged animals filter into its main thoroughfare from the road, such that one can’t quite tell where the road ends and the market begins. We pay our increasingly harrowed Uber driver and hop out from a vehicular traffic jam, into a human one.

I read online that from 4am, KR Market grinds to life. By the time we arrive, it is a veritable chaos. The muddy, well-trodden thoroughfare is a highway of floral commerce. On either side, sari-clad women sit on their haunches in front of piles of colour. Some weave through the crowds toting chains of flowers strung together. One woman saunters past me – she is inexplicably peddling bunches of lustrous, thick human hair. Enormous canvas bags balanced precariously on men’s heads are narrowly missed by the helmet of a motorcycle rider inching his way through the crowd.

Every market has a life of its own — a rhythm only known to its inhabitants. Like an unexpectedly powerful undercurrent, KR’s is irresistible. We get pulled into the market’s undertow and allow its movement to transport us to whatever it wants us to see.

And my goodness, is there a lot to see. There is a rainbow of capsicums lined up like little soldiers atop wet cardboard, bowls of bulbous carrots, an array of glossy heart-shaped betel leaves (used for religious ceremonies, desserts, and chewing tobacco — we love a leaf that does it all), spread out like a fan; there are potatoes and pineapples and brinjals and green beans and melons and yams and passionfruit — and mangoes, so many mangoes. I have heard about the magic of an Indian mango, so I pick a few of two varieties, bring them home for my parents’ discerning palates (my dad proclaims the mango “is pretty special”, which is a compliment of the highest honour, coming from him). There are pale green chillis and gourds that curve around like a dog trying to bite its own tail, pyramids of luridly dyed masala, bouquets of cauliflowers, incredible piles of hairy coconuts, stored up in their very own warehouse space. One stall has banana leaves hanging over its rooftop like a sunshade, while the stallholder industriously dries, brushes, and cuts banana leaves into identical rectangles, which he then folds away and stacks up like freshly laundered towels. We come across one alleyway through which a herbaceous fragrance wafts: the ground is strewn with trampled leafy herbs, which an errant cow peacefully munches away at. At the end of another alleyway, there’s a stall preparing fresh dosa, which men tuck into while standing up. I’m tempted to stop and join them.

To me, KR Market is a blend of Morocco’s Had Draa Market and Singapore’s Pasir Panjang Wholesale Market. There’s the organised mayhem of women and men doing their grocery shopping for the week, while the industrious cadence of wholesale commerce thrums in the background. At Had Draa, I had felt the thrill of being within and without someone else’s weekly routine — being surrounded by a feeling of un-self-conscious, purposeful productivity, without actually having anything to accomplish. As for Pasir Panjang Wholesale Market, I had always felt a secret pleasure of being privy to the bustling, self-possessed energy of wholesalers supplying the country with boxes of kailan, cucumber, carraway seeds, imported from all over the world. Here, individual sellers trying to earn their daily wages jostle with large-scale wholesale traders, whose truckloads of produce trundle in and out of the market. The sense one is given is unmistakable: we have business to do. The sellers know it, the buyers know it, the cows know it, the lorry drivers know it.

It’s almost 9am and we have followed the market’s inexorable motion of humans, motorbikes and cattle to its outskirts. A honk from behind — I hop to the side, just in time for a looming bus to narrowly squeeze its way through the muddy passageway lined with fruit vendors. Our feet are thoroughly soiled. Somehow, we’ve unknowingly joined the main road. We try to hug close to the side of the road, avoiding motorbike taxis and minibuses that honk at us for obstructing the way. Even here, beneath overhead expressways, the market breathes lavishly: lorries piled high with sugarcane sit idle just off the main road, while bundles of sugarcane lean against the highway piling like casual labourers waiting to be picked up. Everywhere, market vendors showcase their produce on the ground.

There’s an organised chaos to this place. It is utterly enervating. As we head towards the nearby bus terminal, we stumble upon a row of mobile dentists. Each stall is operated out of a portable cart equipped with an umbrella. On the wall behind them, posters with pictures of gleaming grins proclaim the efficacy of the dental services on offer. I hang back here for a bit, slightly slack-jawed (I’m sure the stallholders looking back at me see a set of teeth sorely in need of their work).

A lot of articles online about Bangalore lament the problems of over-expansion and untrammelled urbanisation: bad traffic, poor sanitation, challenges to waste management, air pollution. KR Market is a microcosm of the same issues — Karnataka’s politicians have made much of de-congesting and cleaning it up. I know Bangalore longs for shiny modernity just as much as any city. In some quarters, KR Market’s pandemonium may even be a source of embarrassment. I come with the rose-tinted glasses of a sojourner, certainly — if anything, the unmitigated filth, unfiltered smells, unmuted sounds add grit and authenticity to my experience of this place. I longed for this, while ensconced in the luscious surrounds of the hotel where the wedding is being hosted.

As we walk away from the raucous sounds of the market, the city becomes palpably less frenetic. I think, as I often do, about whether I have objectified my experience. The answer is invariably yes: as a traveller, it’s difficult to avoid, and even more so when there is a communication barrier. It is frustrating to hold your feelings up to scrutiny and find that there is little room for critical reflexivity beyond acknowledging your own subjectivity. As I write this now, several months later, I’m conscious of how much of my experience I am constructing with romanticism and my weakness for lyrical expression. I do not have the slightest grasp of the complexities and tensions that underlie Bangalore’s economic, social, cultural compact. The reality is that I’ve spent two hours in one market in one part of the city, and that tells me very little. But at least I know I know very little.

We return to my companion’s hotel room and wash the mud off our feet and shoes in her pristine bathtub. She’s staying in an absolutely breathtaking, Taj Mahal-like luxury hotel. We curl up in plush armchairs and chat over coffee brought to her room in silver teapots. I then return to my hotel room and start dressing up for the day’s wedding festivities: the mehendi. An hour later, I’m standing on the hotel lawn with a hundred other gorgeously dressed wedding guests. My hand is adorned with an intricate henna motif. I look down at my feet, which are now clean, moisturised, and in high heels. My companion shows up at the mehendi slightly later, and we exchange a conspiratorial giggle at the thought of our extremities caked in mud several hours earlier. The stark change of scenery feels almost farcical.

I distrust my words with good reason, as should you. Instead, take this as an invitation to venture outside and get your feet dirty. Put your own subjectivities to the test.

Obviously, no travel has been done in the past year.

My life has been a continuum of days sloping into each other, crouched over multiple screens, animated by the 24 hour news cycle, apportioning trips to The Outside World like pills in the neat little compartments of a medicine organiser. Perhaps you can relate.

My contained existence of these past months have borne some fruit: I have written more than I have in a while (and thankfully not essays), from poetry to legal commentary to opinion pieces on topics close to my heart. This blog has gone sadly neglected, in large part because there wasn’t much content to nourish it with. But recently my mum told me that friends of hers had found their way to this online space, and read about my whimsical market escapades with joyful nostalgia. It makes me happy that my idle writing can provide at least temporal respite for a fellow sufferer of cabin fever, and so I resolve to reinvigorate this space, digging around in my mind for memories of trips past like one desperately grasps for coins to pay the storekeeper (I mean, if you just wave your card at the contactless machine in Tesco/NTUC you really haven’t lived).

We begin with a jaunt that requires no travel at all, but nonetheless takes me to a different time — one without masks, when I practised social distancing by choice and not by law.

The last time mum and I visited Pasir Panjang Wholesale Market, our compact island nation of Singapore was already on high alert. These were still early days of the pandemic, when the words ‘DORSCON Orange‘ were just beginning to acquire a sort of quaint irrelevance, Western countries were being slapped in the face by Covid, and the numbers at home were starting to climb irresistibly up as the virus made its pernicious way through the migrant worker dormitories. For maybe a fortnight, whatsapp messages warning of an impending lockdown would light up the boomer networks like wildfire; inevitably, there’d be a rush to the supermarkets. Singapore had by then lived through the toilet paper shortage, but there were other amusing anecdotes, strangely all about eggs: an egg shortage, imported eggs from Poland, an oversupply of eggs. It was in this panicky climate that we made our last trip to the Wholesale Market.

A day after, its hallowed gates were closed to retail shoppers like ourselves, and my mother was relegated to stare wistfully at the lorries that trundled in and out of the compound each time we drove past.

One thing you ought to understand about my household’s grocery habits is that food shopping is not an errand to run; it is a lifestyle. My mother can visit 3-4 supermarkets/wet markets/food shops in one day, her arms laden with plastic bags (I know — sorry, Mother Earth) from every single one. In her book, there is a different preferred shop for fruits, veggies, seafood, meat, pantry items, aromatics, …and the list goes on. Pasir Panjang Wholesale Market does not tick all the boxes, but it’s pretty close, and cheap. It has been in my mother’s repertoire for as long as I can remember.

Driving past the gantry that marks the market’s entrance, you’ll encounter a pretty confusing vehicular milieu. Battered vans and lorries manoeuvre around BMWs and Jaguars. A forklift is zipping in between a shiny Land Rover and an Audi SUV. The luxury cars belong to mistresses of wealthy households who have figured out you can stock up on good quality, fresh produce for affordable prices here, or else to successful proprietors of any one of the wholesale companies.

As the name suggests, the market is primarily for wholesalers. They have their cold rooms here, where they store veggies, fruits, frozen foods. Rather than a single space with cute stalls decked out with umbrellas and dainty tablecloth, or a pedestrian street lined with ugly delicious food stalls, this is a sprawling compound of cold rooms, retail stores, inventory spaces; gargantuan lorries and forklifts driven by shirtless uncles that whizz past you with perilous abandon. There’s nothing aesthetically pleasing about these sights. But this is a little universe of men and women making a living feeding the rest of the country, and it’s a pretty terrific ecosystem to be part of.

The market’s beating heart is a central, covered space the size of a football field. Wholesale stores display their goods in styrofoam boxes and baskets for retail shoppers to peruse. The prices here are low, and so there is rarely haggling; transactions are typically an efficient process of weighing the produce, proclaiming a price, and handing the produce over for the shopper to carry away. I observe ladies with their domestic helpers trailing after them picking through crates of eggplants, sweaty couples hauling an increasing load of plastic bags from store to store, and sometimes single middle-aged men purposefully striding away carrying an entire box of yams. I imagine some must be owners of restaurants or hawker stores. The stall proprietors, often shirtless pot-bellied Chinese men, watch us all as an emperor whose subjects have come to pay respects would.

If you are a regular like my mum is, you’ll have certain preferred stalls for certain kinds of veggies. Having accompanied her (usually as her carrying mule) more than a couple of times, I know the store that sells the widest range of Western greens (rocket, arugula etc) but also has a stingy 老板 (lǎo bǎn, boss). I know the solitary old lady with stark white hair and a hunchback, who procures her wares by picking through what other big-time wholesalers have discarded. My mum buys bruised bitter gourds, wrinkly capsicums and other less-than-perfect produce from her each time we make a visit.

The stalls are loosely termed — they are more a hodgepodge of crates from which you can take your pickings, all arranged in a multicoloured lego-like obstacle course around where the 老板 sits with his cashier machine and weighing scale. Boxes of produce piled to heights twice my size and still shrink wrapped in plastic, fresh off the shipping container, stand as silent sentinels everywhere you look. As you bend down to pick some arrowhead roots (nga ku in Cantonese) — it makes regular appearance around Chinese New Year, but becomes a rare commodity in other months — you keep a watch out for a forklift toting a tower of Cavendish bananas.

On one side of the covered atrium, dark corridors of cold rooms stretch out, smaller arteries branching out from the main blood vessel. Here, 老板 and their men will retreat for an afternoon siesta or to count money. (Sometimes, they don’t bother — it’s not an uncommon sight to see shirtless men sprawled out on makeshift beds of cardboard boxes, their ribs visible under tanned skin, dozing on the side of their stalls.) On occasion my mother will duck into these corridors to procure beansprouts, which the vendors keep refrigerated, out of the punishing heat of the day.

Across from the atrium is another network of corridors — the domain of the sundry wholesalers. My mum often bustles across the road to visit her regular shop after depositing armfuls of veggies in the car. She comes back with red onions, sesame seeds, dried chilli, vermicilli, dried beancurd, various kinds of dried anchovies, oyster sauce, sweet Thai chilli sauce, dried mung beans, Tetrapaks of coconut milk, gula melaka (a fragrant Malaysian palm sugar), belacan (pungent shrimp paste, essential for making the perennial addition to any meal: sambal belacan), ….. and so on.

If we were in a hurry, she’d press some money in my hand and rattle off a list of items to purchase at the sundry store. When I reached the store and regurgitated the list to the kindly shopkeeper, I’d inevitably run into some kind of quandary my unseasoned marketer self was unequipped to handle. Did she ask for 250ml of coconut milk, or 500ml…? Did she want this brand of fish sauce, or that one? When she said beancurd skin, did she want the one for soup, or the one for frying? At this point, Uncle would reveal his familiarity with my household’s grocery habits, selecting the correct brand or weighing out the right amount or simply putting the correct item together with the rest of what I was tasked to purchase, a small knowing smile creasing his lined face. I’d sheepishly thank him, hand over the money and scamper off (only to return again, nine times out of ten, realising that I had still failed to follow my mother’s instructions in some way).

A short drive and right turn away, past the fruit stores (which my mother rarely patronises; she has another favoured store for fruits…but that’s a story for another time), we sometimes stop by the frozen meat store. An interesting factoid I learnt when I was a little older was that the store we regularly patronised made the bulk of its trade supplying frozen foods to ships for their long voyage. When we did have to buy meat, I remember reciting my mother’s order after her in the car, trying to memorise how to articulate my order to the shopkeeper in Cantonese (yat kei lor qit gor jü yoke, mm goi — 1kg of sliced pork, please). I became friends with the lovely elderly uncle who is the store’s frontman. I’d stand awkwardly and smile and nod and attempt to piece together an answer to his questions with my awful Cantonese, as we waited for the younger shop assistant to don his heavy winter gear to retrieve the pork from the freezer room. I remember the uncle being away for several weeks when he had heart surgery. I worried about him as if he were my real uncle.

If my entire blog were to have a bildungsroman, my memories of this market would be it. As a young girl, I remember hearing the news of a gruesome murder that took place in Pasir Panjang Wholesale Market and sticking extra close to my mother every time we visited after school (which, needless to say, was often). It is odd that I have not revisited it for close to a year now. On my return visits in the past few years, I began to relish its unvarnished chaos; the discarded vegetables strewn all over the floor, the Budai-like (by which I mean their physique, not their demeanour) shirtless shopkeepers, the kopitiam (open-air food court) frequented by crows. I have been visiting this market for more than half my life and perhaps the only sign of gentrification is the opening of an organic food store, its shelves replete with buckwheat and cacao nibs and riceberry crackers and what have you. Except its clientele is not of the lululemon-wearing, designer-bag carrying variety; it appears to be more of athletic-looking 60-something aunties and uncles in trekking sandals carrying NTUC-issued reusable shopping bags.

The market’s gates remain closed to the public, although my mother has often thought about sneaking in. It’s downright painful that the emporium of cheap, fresh food has been humming along all these months without her. For now, we get our sustenance from Sheng Siong Supermarket and NTUC Fairprice, like the rest of Singapore. But nothing quite replaces the wholesale market: visiting familiar shopkeepers, sharp Canto banter and occasional wrangling over price, being able to ask shopkeepers to throw in a handful of fresh herbs for free.

We’ll return. Soon. We have to.

Very little about Morocco is genteel — least so when one ventures to Berber country that spreads itself between the more cosmopolitan, touristic cities.

On a December family getaway, my parents and I are driving back from Essaouira, a UNESCO heritage walled city by the sea, to Marrakech. When I’m with them, my market-hunter instincts bow to more powerful predators (it’s a dog eat dog world). They did raise me, after all. It’s a Sunday, and they’ve set their minds to sniffing out a fabled market my mum has read about online: the largest rural market in the region, an open-air livestock market called Had Draa. The sights out of the window blur into an unchanging undulation of burning sand, and together with the heat I succumb to drowsiness.

I awake to a cacophony of animal noises. This is no delicate sound — men shouting Arabic and Amazigh are overlaid with the clip clop of donkey’s hooves, cars honking, my parents giving conflicted instructions to our bewildered driver on where to park. Cars are cramming themselves along each side of the narrow road, and further along I can see the procession to the market. Moments later we’re in the thick of it: next to me, a hunchbacked little man, his face lined and weathered by the unrelenting sun, riding on his donkey with the imperiousness of a noble. Men of all ages hustling and bantering, their djellabas sweeping along behind them. My parents hurry ahead of me, thrilled and intoxicated by the chaos of it all. This is our type of market.

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My reading material in Morocco was Edward Said’s Orientalism, a text that made me hyper-aware of my propensity to romanticise and inadvertently Otherise my travel experiences. While with a tour group visiting the Atlas Mountains (where Berber villages dot the slopes), I anxiously scrolled through academic articles discussing the political geography of the area. The Berbers are descendants of a tribe in North Africa, the true indigenous people in the region. ‘Berber’ was originally a derogatory slur, and the preferred term for self-identification is Imazighen.

On this Sunday morning, the Imazighen men probably wouldn’t give a hoot what I referred to them as, so long as I kept out of their way. On either side, produce spilled out into the blinding sunlight, fresh olives and oranges and mountains of dates looking like jewels from an overturned treasure chest.

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If this were a meal, this would be amuse bouche. The appetiser is a muddy, mucky obstacle course of a road kept soft and dangerous to your shoes by animal dung, dozens of human footsteps and the hooves of donkeys, horses and cattle coming and going. We hopscotch our way to the main course: a braying, mooing, neighing bazaar of livestock waiting to be carted off by purchasers that had been here bidding away since the crack of dawn. This was not a sight for any animal welfarist. In front of me, a grizzled old man tugged at a rope tied around a defiant calf’s neck, while his three sons heaved their collective bodyweight against her rump. My path gets cut off by a pushcart of goats trundling past.

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All around, men mill about talking shop while they keep their herds/flocks of livestock close. More men sit sipping mint tea in the shade. The absence of the fairer sex is striking — perhaps because Had Draa not only represents the weekly shop, but also a public forum for socialising and economic activity. The story goes that this very market was a site of slave trade serving the Barbary Coast (though I couldn’t find any evidence proving this).

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It’s a scene to behold, of course. Something that ought to be captured in wide-angle lens, with all the people and animals infinitesimal figures like in a landscape by Brueghel the Elder. Watching the action is not only entertainment for us, but it seems the market frequenters too. For us, the fascination is in the novelty; for them, maybe surveying the price of goats that other people are getting.

Our driver for the day, himself an Amazigh, follows behind us in his leather jacket, loafers and a bemused smile on his face. I bet no other tourist has asked you to take them here, I joke with him. We head out back to the appetiser.

Stall keepers crouch over their produce, yelling banter at one another between haggling with their clientele. They blink back the sun, seemingly unperturbed by its scorch. There’s so much beauty here: the way light animates the food, making it leap out of my photographs. The flourish of djellebas, the kicking up of copper coloured dust. Next to me, Mom busily points at veggies and, through an exaggeration of hand gestures and head motions, invariably hands a big bag to me, her Porter-in-Chief.

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When we head back to the car, arms heavy laden and offer a bag of nuts to share, our driver laughs and shakes his head. These crazy Chinese people, he must be thinking. I wonder if I might have essentialised his people and their livelihoods by whipping out my iPhone and snapping a picture. I wonder if he essentialised me and my family when he saw the colour of our skin, if our candid conversation in the car might have been any different if we where white. I wonder if walking into a market like that together did anything to bridge the many gaps that separate us.

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There are many reasons, as this blog effusively demonstrates, why I love markets. Foremost amongst them though is probably the vision of abundance it offers. This may sound horrible and consumerist; maybe it is, but hear me out: we are inundated everyday with front-page shock-value revelations of brokenness and neediness and injustice. The sight of baskets of fresh vegetables and whole fruit layered atop one another at a farmer’s market is a welcome change of scenery. It conjures notions of wholeness, harmony, pleasure. Of peace and comfort.

Especially heartwarming when it’s in a country with a turbulent history. Prague’s devastatingly beautiful architecture belies ghosts of ideologies past — the tyrannical asceticism of the Communists, followed immediately by the Nazis (because of course). Now the Vlatva River, which witnessed show trials during the period of Stalinisation and Czech resistance against the Germans, flows proudly by a bustling Saturday farmer’s market. It’s a blazing morning (somehow, the weather always comes through when I go market tripping) and the market is easy enough to sniff out: tents line the riverbank, I hear strains of jazz from buskers at the market’s mouth. This one’s more of a carnival than your average morning shop — but let’s be real, any decent market is much more than that anyway.

The crowd: a medley of merry makers, visibly in weekend mode. Young couples pushing prams, millennial professional types holding hands (the lady: summer dress, Birkenstocks; the guy: button-down shirt, cuffed chinos, loafers; both sporting Ray-Bans), tourists from across the spectrum (sunburnt American retirees, the duo of backpacking Aussies, a gaggle of teens with generic international school accents evidently on their big interrail Europe trip). It looks like the setting for a pretentious pageant of ‘farm-fresh produce’ with equally puffed-up prices, but the unassuming bustle convinces you of its authenticity, and draws you into its patrons’ Saturday morning languor.

It’s 11am by the time Mum and I reach Naplavka, and I’m starving. I snap up the first thing I see — a cheese and walnut bread stick, which does not disappoint — and off we go. Except unlike many previous market visits, which have often been characterised as reconnaissance missions or hunts, even, this one feels more like what it is: a stroll, punctuated by leisurely pauses.

This market visit is not a cultural explosion, nor is it a headfirst dive into authenticity. I’m aware that I am seeing one very particular facet of Czech society; perhaps not really that local at all, in fact. This market scene could be anywhere from Fremantle, Australia to San Francisco, USA. But it speaks to something particularly Czech nonetheless: an aspirational gravitation to the West, an expression of their ideas of the good life. To be sure, such ideas are not unknown to them: a glimpse of the magnificent Municipal House tells you a bit about the former Czechoslovakia’s rich cultural capital that comes only with affluence. I watch dogs sniff each other’s butts and kids feed swans gliding down the Vlatva. Some Bohemian-types are selling amber at the end of the market. Just nearby, a wine festival is just getting into full swing. The air is a mix of jazz tunes, relaxed bustle, and the smell of freshly cooked food. It’s a far, far cry from the violence this country has seen in modern history. It is nonetheless pregnant with meaning: this country has taken a longer road than many counterparts to arrive at the promised reward: democracy. It’s late morning on a Saturday, and this city is enjoying freedom for all its worth.