Sidewalk Life-Winter Edition

I would like to add to one of my original posts about the city. In it, I described a lot of the commercial and social activities that occur on the sidewalks of this city. Not surprisingly, activities in the winter are different than those in the summer.

One of the seasonal additions is the roasted sweet potato vendor. He/she walks around with a barrel on some sort of wheeled barrow. The barrel has been modified to hold coals and a rack on the inside. The potatoes are roasted as the vendor walks around and then lifted to the top for sale. I remember when I lived in Japan, that the arrival of this exact same vendor caused a lot of joy for Teruyo (my Japanese mother's niece). The potatoes here are much larger than in Japan, and resemble the ones you can purchase in North America. I have not partaken; every time I run into a vendor, I have just eaten, and the potatoes are really best eaten right away. I missed a truly great photographic opportunity the other day; five or six potato vendors were walking in a row down the street- they and their gear may have been dropped off, much like the hot dog vendors and their carts are loaded and transported in Vancouver.

In the last two months, my neighborhood has had a crockery seller on the corner. She too has a large wheel barrow cart that is full of dishes. She sells plates, bowls, tea pots, mugs, and chopstick rests just as a few examples. There are a ton of these outside the gates of IKEA. The flower seller is usually on the opposite corner from the crockery seller; sometimes when the customer appraoches one of them, the other vendor comes up and chats up the products. Near the potato seller in the photo included here, a woman was selling sugar cane. She peels it and you can chaw on it, until the sugar disappears (and spit the fiber out), or she can make into juice for you. I don't recall seeing them last summer, but maybe I was looking in the wrong places- we'll see if it is seasonal.

I also saw the man on the bike with the rabbits in the small cage. Despite the fact that this is not a predominantly Christian nation, one of the usual symbols for Easter, is finding its way to the street for sale. Perhaps it is really about opportunities for selling and nothing else. While watching a Discovery Channel show on China the other night (" Cricket Warrior" all about the ancient sport of cricket fighting!), the narrator mentioned that fighting crickets can also be purchased on the streets of Shanghai- I wonder where?