Muslim Street Market
Friday Panpan and I took the day off work so that we could go to a Muslim street market that only happens on Fridays. We went around lunchtime and tried a variety of delicious minority foods. My favorite was this moist rice with bits of carrot mixed in and a zesty lemon taste, served with a chunk of lamb and some really spicy carrot strips. We sat under bright red tents to get out of the scorching hot sun. (Now that the “plump” rainy season has passed, it’s been very sunny this week. The skies have been so blue that it doesn’t even feel like we’re in China!)
Look how blue the sky is!
New friends making lamb kabobs! Super friendly people; very delicious lamb.
Eating the rice/lamb/carrot dish... so good! (don't worry, I'm not sunburned... the redness is from the tent)
Guy in foreground in serving the rice/lamb/carrot dish
dried fruits. questionable sanitary standards, but we bought some dried apricots and delicious golden raisins anyway!
We also took a peek at the mosque (photo below), but we couldn’t go inside. While we were eating a huge stream of people came out of the mosque, so a service must have just ended. They all came and started feasting on all the good food. I haven’t really noticed many Chinese minorities around Shanghai, but at this market they weren’t really ANY Han Chinese people (and only a handful of other tourists). The minority population must just congregate in its own communities.
The mosque
I was shocked at how different these people looked. They totally didn’t look East Asian! A lot of them looked more Turkish (actually, some Turkish tourists sat next to us and they could mostly understand the minority language the stall owners spoke amongst themselves because it’s related to Turkish). Some of the people there even looked like they could pass for Greek/Spanish/Italian!
A guy who looks more Greek than Chinese making dumplings
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