The Day at the Fish Market

The next morning after my birthday, i woke up at 5:30 am to go to wholesale fish market. This was the place where all the fish that are caught are auctioned and sold off and then brought to their respective shops and restaurants to be sold/eaten. It's supposed to be damn interesting to see the bidding process so i decided to wake up early early.. 5am!!!! (4am in Singapore) to go see..

Actually i got lost for a bit and reached at 6:15am.. so the bidding process over liaoz.. so i was quite sad..but i thought since i was here so just hang around lor...

the first fish i saw was this.. humongous man! looks like salmon.. but it's all frozen so i duno...



i followed the salmon and found that they were sawing the frozen salmon into pieces... and each was damn heavy that it needed 2 or 3 men to carry one.. here's a vid i took.



Then i came to this corner that 2 men were chopping some fish up...quite gross really so i took a vid..



See.. one guy chops the head and the tail of the fish, which is still alive.. then passes to the other guy, while the fish is still semi-alive also.. then the other guy takes this long metal thingy n sticks it through the fish from what used to be the head portion and then the fish is officially deaded... gross man..the end result..


here're some pics of the fish market... very clean and believe it or not, there's no stench in the air... only when u come close to the first then can smell their stinkiness, else there's none in the air.









this dude is shelling huge ji hums... so so bloody and yummy!



i think this is the place where the bidding process was held. of cos it was over by the time i got there... but check out all the huge huge fishes!!!!! and they're marked.. that's why i figured this was the bidding place..











some shellfish shop



the mother of all salmon i saw that day. or is it tuna... i think maybe tuna.. cos in the same shop, it had the chopped up version, in the next pic..



dark red color.. shld be tuna i guess.



then i saw this guy shelling scallops... huge sia.



of cos no trip to the fish market would be complete without a visit to the sushi shops there.. all the shops are damn small... all counter types and had to squeeze. in typical Cornball common sense fashion, i chose the busiest shop to go in. and since i was just 1 person, i got in immediately.. this is how small the shop is..



there's an old japanase woman sitting beside me.. like machiam "Ah Xin" from the old jap series last time like that.


Of course our old japanese colonial masters did not learn much singlish from us when they were "passing through" south east asia so they had a menu that jus had pictures so that was very convenient. there was a set meal and there was an ala carte.. i decided i couldnt eat so much la.. it was jus 7am in the morning.. so i went for ala carte

i ordered my favs.. scallops, tuna, yellow tail... in that order as shown in the picture from left to right. there're no plates or conveyor belts... jus one common kounter.. so authentic.. so cool!

i ate the tuna.. gosh it was HEAVENLY!!!!! absolutely man.. so fresh and so yummy.. and the feeling as it slides through your throat.. oh gosh....



But after the first one, i felt something missing.. oh yes.. no wasabi!! gosh.. such heresy. and i saw that there wasnt bottles of wasabi moving around or being passed around so i asked the chef.

He looked at me, with some disdain..then stretched his hand towards me.... and lifted the piece of fish that was above my sushi.. lifted it up and revealed some wasabi in between the fish and the rice of the sushi... oops... so malu..

the "Ah Xin" beside me laughed...

to give me the sense of the deviant eating culture that the rest of the world has bastardised japanese food. he pulled off some wasabi from his kounter like plasticine and placed it on my portion of the counter. there you go.. u see the little mound of green goodness?

the orange thingy on the left of the wasabi is sea urchin.. yummy.. very swet and very fresh.. but that baby cost me S$10 just for one piece.. then on the right, on a dish, is unagi (eel).. also very yummy.. i ordered one more of that subsequently...and actually a lot more of others too.. hee..



so after getting my wasabi, i still felt something amiss... oh ya.. no soy sauce..i looked around but didnt see any dishes or soy sauce leh... Ah Xin looked at me.. then she flipped this cover thingy that was in front of me and it turned out to be a dish!!!!! i thought it was a coaster!!! muhahaha.. then she pulled a bottle of soy sauce from duno where and poured some into my dish..so sweet of her...

and so my meal was complete..

here's a shot of wat i'd have gotten had i ordered the set meal



the Chef



After eating for a while, the sweet familiar sound of singlish permeated the air.. i see singaporeans.. cool.. i asked them to ask a pic of of me and i did for them also... but cos the shop was so small and thus he was very close to me, the pic made me look fat.. so im not posting it here... hee hee

here's a sense of how small the shop was. the bespectacled man and the girls beside him are the singaporeans



the breakfast cost me S$60. but it was well worth the experience.