Hong Kong: Chun Yeung Market

I’m back in the UK now after a month-long trip to Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia.   As an antidote to jetlag and the grey British winter, I’m posting these colourful photos from Hong Kong markets.

My first stop, the source of those red chillies, was the wet market on Chun Yeung Street, near North Point on Hong Kong Island.

The whole street is double-lined with market stalls and shops selling meat, fish and seafood, Chinese medicine, clothes, and household items.  And of course, a huge range of tropical fruit and vegetables, like these shiny red wax apples.

And Chinese cabbages.  These bring back memories of my time in north-east China.  Every winter, people in Dalian would buy these cabbages, and then store them in the open air, on the roof of their apartment buildings.  No fridge or freezer needed when the winter air is cold and dry enough.

Back in Hong Kong, in another market near Graham Street, I found these pomelos.  I miss these – sour grapefruits are no substitute.  I wonder if I can buy them somewhere in London.

There will be more posts from my holiday.  If they appear at odd hours, blame the jetlag.

Fruits of the Drumlin

It’s blackberry-picking time again on the drumlin.

Fields on drumlins tend to be small, and separated by hedgerows, which means that September brings free berries for anyone prepared to brave the dangers of nettle stings, red stained-fingers, and skin pricked by bramble thorns.  Here are some of the berries I picked last week.

Here’s something much gentler, harvested without pain – sweet pea in my aunt and uncle’s garden, still fragrant and beautiful even on a rainy day.

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Last Burst of Indian Colours

I have chosen the wrong time of year to leave Bangalore and return to London. I’m going to miss the bright sunshine, the splashes of colour on every street.

Banana Stems

We harvested the bananas in the garden last Friday.  I will disappoint readers of my earlier post by admitting that I did not cook the banana flower – my excuse is that the flower was too small. Here is a photo of one of the leaves instead.

I thought we might need steps to reach the bananas, but we didn’t – the branches of the banana tree can be bent down to ground level by a couple of strong gardeners. Gardener Shankar harvested the bananas.  Then he got to work demolishing the entire tree with a sickle just like the tools from this post.

Then we took up Gardener Shankar’s suggestion of consigning the banana fruit to a wholesale banana shop for quick ripening. Last year we made our own storage box in the garage, and waited impatiently for two weeks for the bananas to ripen.   I don’t know what the shop will do, apart from store our fruit in a really hot room. Maybe they will just swap them for some ripe fruit?

As well as the fruit, we were harvesting the banana stem.  Our driver told us that he believed banana stems to have great health benefits in preventing and treating kidney stones.

The outer layers of the stem were stripped away, and the sickle was put to use again.


We weren’t impressed with our stem – like the flower it was too small.  But Dayalan went home with some pieces for cooking anyway.

Dussehra – the Prequel

What do you do with a sackful of flowers in Bangalore this week?  Celebrate the festival of Dussehra (also called Dasara).

At this festival people honour the tools that they use in your home or at work. Anything from a sewing machine to a tractor to a laptop, even a camera.

My photos of last year’s Dussehra appear in a series of three blogposts, starting here.

This year, our driver is planning a puja for the vehicles on Friday, so I don’t have photos of our own ceremony yet.   Instead, here are the supplies that you need for the puja, on sale from roadside vendors on Whitefield Main Road.

If you are doing a puja for the car, you need banana leaves to decorate the front of the vehicle.

Then you need offerings of fruit and leaves.

And pumpkins to be smashed.

This ceremony means a lot to our Hindu driver; and to me it is a symbol of the anniversary of my husband’s job in Bangalore, and of our driver working for us.

Banana Flowers

We have bananas in the garden again.  One banana tree gave us fruit in January, as reported here and here.  A second tree is now holding green bananas and a banana flower. This is how they looked on Wednesday.

These bananas look smaller than January’s crop.

For the first time in my life, I have paid attention to the banana flower.

Banana flowers are edible – here are some on sale in Bangalore’s Hypercity supermarket.

They cost 20 rupees per kilo. At least they did two months ago. I took this photo before our own banana flower appeared, and food prices have been rising in India.

P.S. For anyone interested in ladybirds, I updated my post “Is there any country that doesn’t have ladybirds” this week, after spotting something spotty in the garden.

Oranges, Pomegranates and Bananas

I am back in Bangalore. The fruit on sale on the market stalls of Whitefield and Varthur does rival the Irish plums and blackberries, so here are some oranges, pomegranates and bananas in all their glorious colours.

Apples and Plums

I’ve already told you how keen I am on India’s tropical fruits, like mangoes and bananas.  But my trip to Northern Ireland has not been fruitless.  Here are some photos of apples and plums in my brother’s garden.

That photo was taken on 3 September. One week later, on 10 September, the autumn sun had conspired with John Keats “To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core”.

I haven’t eaten any of the apples, but the plums are delicious.

My cousins also have plum trees, and are equally generous with their fruit.  So it has been a plum-filled September for the whole family, well, except for one over-enthusiastic springer spaniel. Steve would eat all the plums if we’d let him, but they are terrible for his digestion, so we try to distract him with the throwing ring.