When I first moved to China, I thought that the pile of eggs stacked so neatly at the wet mar­kets looked so naked with­out their egg crate pack­ag­ing. Bring­ing home eggs in a small plas­tic bag­gie?! The idea seemed so out­ra­geous, so crazy. What hap­pened if they BROKE?!

But like many other things, the sights and sounds that were once so for­eign and shock­ing are now a part of my daily life– a daily life that I have expec­ta­tion of now, yearn­ings for, even. I am going back to the states for a cou­ple of weeks in August, and have a feel­ing that reverse cul­ture shock might take place. As insane as it may sound, I love the dirty alley­ways, the open-air meat mar­kets, the cou­ples yelling on the sub­way, and the push­ing and shov­ing in lines. Okay, maybe not that last one.

Most of all, I love my mar­kets. I love the chicken lady who knows I usu­ally buy whole chick­ens cut into quar­ters, the lady I buy most of my greens from and tells me what’s best to buy, I love the man­gos­teens and drag­on­fruit and huge water­mel­ons that are piled on the fruit­stands, I love hav­ing to walk to my local wet mar­ket every other day if I choose to cook, I love cir­cling the veg­etable stalls two or three times before I decide on what to lay my hands on. I even love hav­ing to run from store to store to store to find some­thing as sim­ple as AP flour.

And even though I don’t love to eat eggs, I love buy­ing them. In fact, my new­found love of egg pur­chas­ing has almost got­ten me to turn the cor­ner as far as eat­ing them. At the wet mar­kets in China, egg ven­dors set up with mounds of egg pyra­mids piled lay­ers deep– chicken eggs, duck eggs, salted eggs, large goose eggs. Of course the chicken egg pyra­mids are piled the high­est, and though there are often more than one vari­ety of chicken eggs, I do what I do in China when I have no idea what my choices actu­ally are– just choose some­thing in between. So I usu­ally buy the chicken eggs that are in the mid­dle, both in terms of price as well as color and size.

Now, all egg ven­dors also have a small ledge with holes in front of their stand, as if it were a ring toss booth at a county fair. Choose your eggs, flip on a switch under the ledge by your hips and a light bulb turns on inside the hold. Each egg can then be placed over the hole and exam­ined to make sure there are no unlaid embryos loom­ing within. It’s quite a med­i­ta­tive process to me now, care­fully select­ing each egg and set­ting them aglow to exam­ine them.

Buy­ing a dozen white eggs in their car­tons from the super­mar­ket now seems like a con­cept so waste­ful, so removed, so forced. Sure there’s plenty of things that I miss about “home”, but like I said I’m get­ting used to how things are done around here– and some things really aren’t that bad at all.