{"id":467,"date":"2010-08-31T16:22:27","date_gmt":"2010-08-31T21:22:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/?p=467"},"modified":"2014-03-31T16:28:10","modified_gmt":"2014-03-31T21:28:10","slug":"the-meat-market-warning-explicit-animal-parts-ahead-by-zall-age-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/?p=467","title":{"rendered":"The Meat Market (Warning: Explicit Animal Parts Ahead) – by Zall, age 14"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Meat Market (Warning: Explicit Animal Parts Ahead)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Writing these stories gets increasingly difficult.\u00a0 The more I travel, the more I think that what I see overseas is normal.\u00a0 A simple walk down the road will reveal people burning plastic garbage, little kids rolling rusty metal hoops down the slope, and busy looms under every thatched-roof hut; it all seems entirely normal, just an everyday walk.\u00a0 But if someone who had not traveled saw this, they might have freaked out, taken hundreds of pictures, and written pages of articles on this one walk.\u00a0 So I\u2019ve been trying to see Lao life through the eyes of a fresh visitor.\u00a0 What would be amazing?\u00a0 One example: every slightly larger town has a market, and in every market are the counters where local women are selling fresh meat, waving sticks with plastic bags tied at the end to shoo away the ever-present swarms of flies.<\/p>\n

\"Zall,<\/a>

Zall, with his camera and MAG shirt, on assignment in a tuk-tuk in Laos.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Entering the meat section, the smell of raw meat and flies floats around us like a heavy fog.\u00a0 The rows of stands seem to go on until they dip below the horizon.\u00a0 All along these stalls, piled up like mountains, is every type of fresh, dripping meat that you could ever imagine; rats, bats, cats, chicken fats, and little scraps.\u00a0 Everything is posed in a way to make the pieces look a little more attractive.\u00a0 They make the prepared dogs look like they are smiling by placing their heads towards the buyers, and then (and I don\u2019t know how they do this), they make the bald-headed dog grimace, exposing it\u2019s teeth and then curling the lips up.\u00a0 Next to the dog heads is a stack of bald forelegs, still with their paws.\u00a0 They burn the hair off, apparently.\u00a0 Their red roasts and internal organs are neatly piled to one side.\u00a0 Needless to say, it doesn\u2019t look too appetizing to this westerner.<\/p>\n

\"Fresh<\/a>

Fresh meat vendors in Laos.<\/p><\/div>\n

The pigs faces look like they\u2019re the happiest creatures alive.\u00a0 Really \u2013 you can buy a pig face in the market!\u00a0 They do this by skinning the entire pig face \u2013 chin, cheeks, ears, eyebrows and all –\u00a0 and then shape them to look happy.\u00a0 You can buy every other part of a pig as well \u2013 and I mean every part \u2013 kidneys, intestines, livers, hooves, tails.\u00a0 And some parts I still don\u2019t know what they are.\u00a0 They\u2019re all piled tidily on the plain wood counter.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never seen so many different shades of red.\u00a0 You can even buy a pie-shaped slice of coagulated blood.<\/p>\n

\"Happy<\/a>

Happy pig face in Laos.<\/p><\/div>\n

Occasionally, the butchers come up to you and offer some smelly, gray, shriveled, barbecued rats.\u00a0 These rats are \u201ccrucified\u201d on thin bamboo sticks and then smoked over a fire.\u00a0 Their bones look to be jabbing through their hides and any meat seems to have shrunk away.\u00a0 Although we have been offered these many times (they seem to be especially treasured as bus snacks by the locals), when the hordes of flies jump off the rodents, leaving god-knows-what all over the \u201cmeat,\u201d our stomachs twist and we decide it\u2019s better to wait for fresh ones.\u00a0 Which we will usually try to avoid as well.\u00a0 Rat meat is really strong tasting, somewhere between dog and bat.<\/p>\n

\"Water<\/a>

Water buffalo forelegs for sale in Xam Neua, Laos.<\/p><\/div>\n

There are field rats cut open to show off how fresh they are, live frogs with their feet tied together, hunks of dried water buffalo skin, and rows upon rows of strange brown spices.\u00a0 We\u2019ve seen piles of small black bats, fish sliced open with their hearts still pumping, and huge water buffalo legs.\u00a0 Sometimes there are trays of white, thumb-sized grubs or black beetles with their wings pulled off.<\/p>\n

\"Fresh,<\/a>

Fresh, Laos rats with juicy guts exposed.<\/p><\/div>\n

To someone who had never traveled to the out-back of Asia, this would be something amazing, but to me, this is now a familiar market.\u00a0 So when I sit down and write these stories, I have to put myself in someone else\u2019s shoes.\u00a0 I have to imagine it as if I had never seen kids chewing chunks of barbecued goodness-knows-what-on-a-stick. It also makes me wonder what in our \u201cnormal\u201d world here in Eugene might look weird to some kid from a small Ta-Oi village in Laos or Vietnam<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Meat Market (Warning: Explicit Animal Parts Ahead) Writing these stories gets increasingly difficult.\u00a0 The more I travel, the more I think that what I see overseas is normal.\u00a0 A simple walk down the road will reveal people burning plastic … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":473,"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions\/473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}