One of my favourite places in Haikou is the market in 新民英路 , Xinmin Dong Lu.
It's marked on Google's map as a road, but it's more or less pedestrain and very narrow. One of the ways into it is from Bo'ai Lu, 博爱路. When we were here before, about three years ago, we were walking up this street one evening and found a man with a very expensive camera taking pictures of all the old buildings. My wife started talking to him, and she told that he said all these buildings were to be demolished. I think he must have had incorrect imformation, because now, 2016, there has been a lot of restoration and the whole area looks to be "valued".
There are indeed many buildings in bad repair,
but I felt much more optimistic for the area than previously. I have a personal reason for wishing 博爱路小区 well: my son was born in the small maternity hospital nearby.
But look at the sky! I had forgotton my umbrella, and so didn't stay out long. Sometimes the thunderstorms come regularly in the afternoons, which as long as you don't get caught outside is on the whole a "good thing" -- the evening will be cooler.
Is it a little like Macau? I don't think the Portuguese were here, but we were walking down a street very like this a few months ago, on a daytrip from Zhuhai.
Anyway, I'm sorry for the digression. Here's the market which is now much better organized, with the stalls being set a little further back, and the road newly re-paved. Although not clear from the first photograph, the first twenty or thirty metres is devoted to various dried seafoods. When I first visited here, maybe as much as ten years ago, I thought I had found somewhere to buy dried fruit, figs and apricots. But no, it is all dried seafood, for soups I think.
These are not such a mystery: dried fish.
And there are vegetables. I have to apologise, because behind me is the really interesting picture: the snakes, but I couldn't bring myself to photograph them. It seemed to much of an imposition. They were big and no doubt very poisonous, so I quickly passed them by.
Ice: there are men and women on their tricycles busily moving the ice around, because next up are the fresh fish.
When we lived close to here, my wife used to come sometimes to buy shellfish, but was always had the impression that they didn't really want to sell to her. I think perhaps that the main customers here are the restaurants, so that even late in the afternoon there is still a lot of business going on.
Lobsters, for the wealthier among you ...
... but the crabs are much cheaper, and there are all sorts of small fish and shellfish to feed the brain cells. When we were in Turkey, in Gaziantep, it was the seafood that my wife missed the most. There was fish, apart from the hottest summer months, but nothing like this market.
And just to finish: you wander along this market, looking left, looking right, and then suddenly it has ended and where has the road gone?
Yes, this indeed the way and after a few minutes it widens out again and it's time to catch the bus back to the hotel, before the storm breaks.
All content is my own, the photographs taken this afternoon with my small HTC phone. You can find my other posts, which are mainly poems, here: @richardjuckes. Thank you for reading.