Day 32 - Guangzhou Markets

My day started around 9 am and did some laundry. I'm a freaking pro at doing laundry in the sink now. I met some people from the hostel at around 10:30 and we set off to find the weird animal market that sells animals for consumption. We took the subway to Huangfu station and found the market area. Qing Ping market had a bunch of live snakes, frogs and turtles for sale. Cool but not quite as weird as we had hoped. The butchers though were a piece of work. They were topless and smoking cigarettes over the meat they were cutting up and touching everything with their bare hands. It was quite disgusting as there was no refrigeration here. There were also people selling butchered meat out of their homes on their front stoops. We walked a little further and found an area that sold pets such as dogs, cats, fish, chipmunks and rabbits. There was a 3 month old St. Bernard puppy in a basket that was for sale for 2500Y ($385) and other puppies for 300Y ($46). It was crazy. This street was lined with animals in baskets for sale. The ones that were in cages were in tiny cages but they looked like they were being well taken care of despite the fact that they probably were products of puppy mills. We headed off to Tongfu Market in search of weird animals but the only thing that we saw here were some of the same as we did in Qing Ping Market plus a barrel of live scorpions and a few chicken beheadings. I think this market is now in the villages and such as the Olympics had recently happened and I'm sure the Chinese government didn't want the animal market as the image of China for tourists.

Left the market disappointed that there was no other things to be seen and went to buy my railway ticket to Hong Kong. The East Guangzhou railway station sells tickets from Guangzhou to Kowloon for 168Y ($30) in an hour and 40 min so I had my $300 plane ticket for the 45 min journey refunded. Sweet! Extra cash!