If you enter my market from the street level, the first vendors you will encounter are the rice sellers. There are maybe five or six of these folks. They're not very busy -- since most people just buy giant sacks or rice and use them up slowly, the vendors don't have a steady stream of customers. I regularly saw one of them napping in a giant recliner he had dragged behind his counter. Me, I would buy just one jin at a time. Which explains why I was always running out of rice.

There are supposedly all kinds of rice, but I'll be darned if I know any of them. The vendors would invariably often point to one bag or another, so I'd just buy what they recommended. It wasn't very expensive.

Most of the vendors, it seemed, sold vegetables. Given the compound's location in the countryside, about 20 minutes from Jiujiang City proper, this wasn't surprising.

The selection of all the vegetable vendors was entirely seasonal. You'd finally get up the nerve to try a vegetable you'd been staring at for months, take it home, cook it, and love it... and the next time you went to the market, it had vanished, never to be seen again. But there'd be something new and different available in its stead.

Lotus root was pretty much available year-round.

I love lotus root -- it's like potato, but less starchy. Fried up with vinegar and chile peppers, it's great.

More vegetables.

Also sold fresh at the market alongside the veggies are fresh rice noodles and rice cakes. Sometimes they had tang yuen too.

An unsliced sheet of fresh dofu, made at the market.

Want spices to go with your dishes? Vendors had giant sacks of dried spices -- pulverized chiles, star anise, and cumin, amongst others.

Also widely available were "pickled things"... though I was never quite sure what most of them were.

It was such a novelty to me to pick out each and every one of my eggs.

When I picked one up, the vendor would usually take it from my hand, hold it up to her ear, and shake it. I think this is a way to determine whether or not it's gone bad.

When it comes to freshness, there's nothing quite like seeing your meal killed. I saw this happen all the time for fish.

Fish was plucked straight out of a basin and hacked with a cleaver. Cleaning often commenced on the spot.

Fish was weighed in the same little hand-held scale that all the vendors had -- and sold by the jin.

Meat, thankfully, was killed offsite. Not only could you buy slabs of pork, but minced pork (perfect for making dumpings at home) was also available.

I often wondered about carpal tunnel syndrome.. does it affect these people who chop-chop-chop all day long?

During my time in China, I didn't develop the knack (or desire) for cooking frogs or eels, but a lot of people there sure have it.

And then of course, there are the chickens and ducks. If you read about my Thanksgiving, you know I had four birds killed in honor of that celebration... a unique experience.

The poultry corner also sells pigeons. Although I'm sure these pigeons were raised for consumption, and they're hadn't eaten any meals out of trash cans in Central Park, I was still squeamish about them. I never tried them. For in NYC, we believe pigeons are just "rats with wings."

The market sure was a social center. After a month, the people manning the stalls began to recognize me (and my poor language skills) as the "foreign teacher", and generally knew what I bought. A friend of mine from school said that one of the vendors had remarked to her that "the foreign teacher really loves potatoes!"

What I loved most about the market was that people go every day. For a person who learned cooking partly from opening cans, popping the tops off of bottles and shaking flakes out of a canister, staring at a selection of only raw ingredients was at times daunting. If I wanted to season something, I had to wash some cilantro, pull the leaves off the stem and then chop it, for crying out load. Why, that took a good three minutes!

But I loved the freshness of it all. Sure, you had to soak your veggies in water (I scrubbed mine with soap sometimes). But at the end of the day, they tasted so much better than something from a US supermarkets, hauled across three states on a flatbed and glistening with a chemical sheen sprayed on to "preserve freshness."

Buying, cooking and eating these items may not seem "sophisticated"... but the tastes of simple fresh foods were a lot more sophisticated than you'd think.