One of the many mar­kets that I only recently explored was the local plant and flower mar­ket. Located just across the river from my home, I’m sur­prised I hadn’t ven­tured out sooner.

It’s too bad, because there were aisles and aisles of pot­ted plants and flow­ers, from as lit­tle as $5-$10 for a fern that reached my height. I could have def­i­nitely spent a pretty penny at this mar­ket, get­ting some plants for our house. It’s actu­ally prob­a­bly a good thing I dis­cov­ered this mar­ket so late in our tour.

Of course being in China, you can’t go to a mar­ket and not see a fire haz­ard. For exam­ple, this light, that was hang­ing down the mid­dle of an aisle, dan­gling by a wire. Things like this used to scare/anger/annoy me, but now make me smile. I’m actu­ally going to miss this stuff!!

Granted, this mar­ket wasn’t as excit­ing as say, the kitchen mar­ket, or the jew­elry mar­ket, or the leather mar­ket. After all, they’re just plants. But as with all out­ings in Guangzhou, it’s inter­est­ing just to walk around and see the quan­ti­ties of stuff being sold, adver­tised, and packed. Watch­ing the locals go about their daily busi­ness is also akin to peo­ple watch­ing at the air­port– it pro­vides a sur­pris­ing amount of enter­tain­ment and amusement.

It was plenty hot by the time I was out– and being the mid­dle of the day, busi­ness was slow. Shirts were off, cards were being played, women were sit­ting back fan­ning them­selves. Peo­ple were loung­ing like lazy cats all over the mar­ket, with ample amounts of shade cre­ated by the large over­hang between the aisles. Where there was no over­hang, there was plenty of plant shade to be found. I guess there’s def­i­nitely some ben­e­fits to be work­ing at the plant market.

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