The Night Market

We were blessed with very cool head teachers.  They are a married couple from Texas, not too much older than us, and tons of fun to be around!  On Tuesday night they took us to the night market, and we've been back every night since!

It is seriously so close to our apartments.  Probably like a 10 minute walk.  At this night market you can find socks, underwear, plants, cell phone accessories, and food.  Did I mention food?!  Seriously, so much food.  All of it is super cheap, and from what we tried, all of it is pretty delicious!

Picture courtesy of my cute new friend Shey, whose blog can be found here.

It has been tough eating at the cafeteria knowing that we could just walk down the street and get a couple of exceptional and inexpensive meals.  So we've just been picking at our cafeteria food and then eating everything at the night market just a few hours later.  We've eaten flavorful flatbread, Chinese burrito things, noodles, potstickers, french fries, dumpling soup, and of course, fried squid on sticks.  Delicious!

We get a lot of funny looks as a group of white kids, but everyone is super friendly to us.  This one guy was making waffle cone-type things, and we spent a good 8 minutes trying to explain that we wanted to only buy one, instead of the whole bagful he was trying to sell us.  He really didn't understand, so then a huge group of people started gathering, trying to help, and other vendors were yelling to the cone guy, also trying to help.  He finally understood what we were asking and said, "one??  FREE!" and cheerfully gave us a whole cone for free.  What a nice guy.  It was tasty.  But everyone on that row was laughing at us.

Tonight I bought some adorable socks.  One pair has little sailors on them, and the other pair has cows and fences.  I'm obsessed with socks!  After some haggling, I bought the most beautiful embroidered blue tunic shirt for 40 kuai (about $6) which I'm very happy about.  I also bought some earmuffs because that's what all the cool Asians are doing these days.

The fun does't end there!  I've never seen games at Chinese markets, but I guess it is a thing!  For just 10 kuai you can get an armload - and I seriously mean an armload, packed from shoulder to wrist, of wooden rings which you can throw on objects.  Whatever your ring encircles, you get to grab and keep!  I won two teapots on the first night, and Bailey and I both won a couple more things tonight!  How could you say no to 10 kuai games is what I'm wondering, especially when you can get some sweet teapots!

Bailey also shot some balloons with airsoft guns.  The prizes weren't as cool for that game (he won a deck of cards), but he likes those shooting kinds of games.

Oh how I love the night market!  That's all I have to say about it for now, but I'm sure we will be back!