Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Supermarket into business for the dead

As the world changes, the behavior of its inhabitant also changes. Those day woman is the housewife and the kitchen is her castle with pans, cooking knife, forks, spoons and spatulas as her armory. With this and the raw material from the wet market, she will cook up some fabulous dishes for the family. This gradually changes as society needs evolve slowly.

The kitchen now is equipped with slow cookers, microwave oven and freezer. The wet market has been replaced with the one stop center which they called supermarket. Now instead of walking around in a wet market and getting pieces of mud stuck at the back of the ankles, she enjoys the air-conditioned and clean environment of the supermarket. There are a lot of interesting things you could find in a supermarket but the least I expected is to find items such as shirts, shoes and hell money for the dead. Recently I was at Jusco and this is what I saw beside the fruit juice sections.

4 comments:

richwhiteboy said...

Hi, me again. I am in Texas, USA, and am curious about other cultures. Would you please explain to us Americans what is a "wet market" and "hell money for the dead?"

Thanks!

SooHK said...

We call it wet market because it is not enclosed. Sometimes the water from the fish stores, chicken stores, vegetable store and etc, cause the floor to become wet hence the name.
Hell money is a replica of what we human uses of the original money. It will be burn to the spirits and we hope they will get in on the “other side” and uses it.

richwhiteboy said...

Oh I see.

In Mexico and now in the southern USA since we have so many immigrants we have a "Day of the Dead." In Spanish, "El Dio de los Muertes." The Mexicans make candy in the shape skeletons. Some of these creations can be very elaborate--they have skeleton weddings, skeleton mariachi bands, etc.

In Mexico they take these candies to the graves, along with the deceased's favorite foods and clean the graves and have a picnic, just like you do!

In my own culture, which is white southern USA, my grandparents and their friends and relatives used to have a twice-a-year gatherings at the cemetary to clean the graves. They would bring fried chicken and potato salad and all sorts of food and eat right there on the graves.

Isn't it great that all these different cultures have this one thing in common?

We are so much alike in so many wways, all of us, don't you think?

P.S.: i don't think I like the idea of the "wet market." It sounds very wierd to me; so maybe we really are different.

O Soohk, I don't know. do you think the world will ever be as one?

SooHK said...

As long as it is not govern by one individual, it will never be.

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