The Mother Market

Posted: May 8th, 2009 | Author: Josh Riedel | Filed under: Breakfast, Dinner, Drinks, Lunch |

Tonight we wandered around Ha Noi until daybreak. We made our way to Long Bien Bridge, where we looked out onto the Everglades-esque terrain and at intricate spider webs. Best of all, we found the market of markets–”the mother market,” as Erin dubbed it–the place where all the street vendors who carry around baskets full of food on those bamboo poles get their bananas and mangoes, their greens and giant slabs of meat, their buckets of snails–you name it. It’s chaotic and pushy, not a place to stroll and gaze. Everyone has a defined route, a set agenda. Here, you buy by the bushel, not by the pound.

We got there at around 4:30am. In order to enter the market proper, we had to wait for the right moment to cross the street. I shadowed a woman who looked like she knew what she was doing, dodging motorbikes and trucks and trying not to get trampled by street vendors heading away from the market, en route to neighborhoods across Ha Noi. Once we made our way across the busy street, we entered the market.

One of the first things I noticed about the market was that 95% of the people there were female. Alex and I seemed to be the only other males there not lifting and hauling boxes, or delivering buckets of squid or slaughtered pigs via motorbike. And of course, the market is not designed with tall people in mind. I had to duck beneath elaborate networks of extension cords and electrical wiring as we made our way through.

The market is divided into sections. There’s the fruit and vegetables section, the meat section, the seafood section, etc. Each of these sections is further divided into subsections–for instance, there’s quite a large area in the seafood section devoted to the sale of different types of squid.

Seafood at The Market of Markets from josh r on Vimeo.

The squid is housed beneath large tents and shares this space with a few other creatures, including crabs and snails crawling around in large buckets. Outside the squid tent is more seafood, mostly live fish swimming around in circular tubs, just like you see at any other market in Ha Noi. The difference here is that there’s just so much of everything and so much to choose from, which means that the smell of fish is particularly potent. The ground in the seafood section is wet and puddly, and most of the women selling and buying wear clogs or waterproof boots. My feet managed to stay dry, despite the fact that I was wearing my old hightops with holes in the soles.

The meat section was probably my favorite section. We can get pretty decent cuts of meat at our neighborhood market, but the slabs of beef here looked so good. There was also lots of delicious-looking pork sitting on tables, waiting to be chopped. I’ve been told the Vietnamese like fatty portions of meat, and I think I can believe that after seeing the fatty cuts people were buying up at this market.

I don’t recall much about the fruits except for the fact that the hands of bananas were a deep green color, far from ripe. It’s not unusual here to see unripe bananas, but these were the freshest I’ve seen. Maybe people prefer really unripe bananas for certain dishes or stews?

A friendly man wearing a pair of shorts and nothing else beckoned us over with cries of “ca phe, ca phe!” We stopped and asked how much. He said 10000 for a cup, and even though everyone else probably pays half that, we decided it’d be nice to sit down and take a break from our meanderings. For whatever reason though (I can think of many), the lady behind the table, who was working frantically, preparing something (not sure what), said, “I can’t.” So no coffee for us.

On the edge of market territory was a pleasant, relatively calm space where shirtless men shot pool on two different pool tables. Across the street, inside a quiet garage-type shop, a girl made long ropes of tofu. I want to go back to take better photos and video, but this will have to do for now.

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