Prepping for Good Friday

I should start this by saying that Dagupan is a fishing town. The roads are bordered by fish ponds, kids start fishing at young ages (my Uncle Ricky says his earliest memories of fishing alone were at 5 or 6 years old), everyone eats fish, and the fish you eat is always fresh.

So, in preparation for Good Friday, I went with Uncle Ricky & their family's maid to the fish market at 930 PM on Thursday. We walked in between buildings that lined the main road and made our way through the hall of dried fish, which I can assure you smells as bad as you'd think. Once we had exited the smelly tent-like structure, we walked into a sort of back corner alleyway. There were stalls and stalls of fish lying in buckets of ice and people sitting around them hoping to sell their catch.

Uncle Ricky asked around for the fish he was looking for but unfortunately, we were early. The first load would come in around 11 PM, leaving us time to kill. So we left the buckets of fish, walked back through the tent of dried fish, and crossed the street to get to the other market.

This time we walked through a clothing market that looked nearly identical to the one I went to in Quezon City with Uncle Ricky's sister, Mary Ann. After passing nearly 15 tents playing loud music and weaving our way through the crowds of people (I was surprised at how busy this bazaar was at this time of night) we reached our destination: the vegetable tents.

One of the several vegetable tents.

Loomy, Uncle Ricky's maid, walked over to the fresh crops and started inspecting. She was handed a silver bowl to place her vegetables in by the girl who was manning the tent with her sister. The two looked to be around 12-15 years old. Once Loomy made her selection, she handed the silver bowl back to one of the young girls who placed it on a scale before bagging the veggies up and naming a price. We left with three bags of fresh vegetables and made our way back to the car.

Uncle Ricky drove us back home and I got ready for bed. It mustve been around 45 minutes to an hour later that he knocked on my window and asked if I wanted to go back to the fish market to pick up what we couldn't before. By that point though, I was drifting in and out of sleep so I wished him luck before shutting down for the night.