Day 5 - Fish in the Morning, Fish at Night

A very exciting part of the trip was cancelled today...the cycling....due to rain. WE were all pretty upset, but thankfully there’s a chance that we can go tomorrow. So this morning instead of hopping on a bike, we stayed dry and took a cooking lesson instead We first went to the local market to get the ingredients, I wish I had photos but I couldn’t bring my camera with me because it was pouring rain, but my nifty waterproof video camera captured some clips which I’ll put up soon.


What an experience! If you think: “ whatever, it’s a market, fruit, vegetables, meat, meh it’s all the same everywhere” then you’d be surprised. I don’t think I’d ever seen so many different animals and animal body parts for sale, not to mention that I wasn’t even aware that some of them are edible. I’d obviously seen various meats before though so it wasn’t tooooo unusual...but seeing dogs hanging, that was hard to look at ( I could get into a lot more gruesome detail but I really don’t think I should).


It was explained to us numerous times that these dogs are raised for such purposes, but I still really can’t get past the fact that it is a dog though. Anyway, I know that it’s a touchy topic and I don’t plan to dwell on it I just thought that it is definitely something I should mention because it’s something we certainly don’t see in our grocery stores in Canada. It’s actually interesting that the hardest footage to get on this trip so far has been footage that involved food preparation, any time we’ve passed kitchens wanting to take a photo or video, the people would shoo us away, and the situation was the same in the market. There were several vendors who allowed it and in fact wanted to be on camera, but many of the ones with dogs got angry at anyone trying to take a photo, so we went to other stalls.


After we got ingredients at the market, we went to the cooking school which has a beautiful view of the surrounding mountains and even an outdoor cooking area for sunny days. We got to prepare and eat three different local dishes (chiken, fish and dumplings) and then explored the town a little before going out on a boat in the evening to watch cormorant fishing. At night the fishermen float on a raft with a light attached in the front and use trained cormorant birds which follow this light to find fish. The birds have a ring tied around their neck so when they catch a larger fish it gets caught in their throat, the fishermen then grab the bird out of the water and pull the fish out. The water was murky from the rain so we’re told that the birds couldn’t see as many fish as they normally would, but we got to see one get caught which was enough to understand how it’s done.


I don’t have any good photos cause it was so dark, but in my video I promised to do drawings so here’s one of a fisherman.



I didn’t promise good drawings, I just promised drawings, okay!


For such a small town, Yanghsuo is quite the lively place, even at night. Many of it’s little streets are filled with vendors selling all sorts of souvenirs and snacks till late in the night, so we stayed out after the fishing, shopped and explored.

Fingers crossed for sunny skies and biking tomorrow!!!