(101 Things About Shanghai) Brutally honest meat

I love Chinese supermarkets.

A lot of foreigners I know simply refuse to shop in Chinese supermarkets because some sections can be viscerally overwhelming. Like the meat and fish section.  Our local supermarket reeks of fish and flesh, most of which is not neatly packaged in little styrofoam containers.

There are tubs of live frogs under netting, tanks full of live, swimming fish of all sorts, trellises covered with butterflied dead pigs, chickens, ducks. Everything is either very much alive or very much (and very obviously) dead.

At the moment, there are temporary clothes racks filled with dry-cleaning-styled long drying fish alongside the usual wall of flat, dry posterboard fish.

The whole place smells wet, muscly, bloody, fishy. The stinky tofu section is in there too, right next to the fresh sea weed section, so adding in a certain bacterial, oceany tang.