Wet Market

One block from my office is the Pasar Besar, the local market. The upstairs sells clothing, which you can see here, but the best part is the HUGE wet market on the ground floor. You can get fruits, vegetables, dry goods, baked goods, seafood, chicken, beef, purses, cheap jewelry etc etc.

Let's start with the fruit section. There are lots and lots of fruit vendors.

Some specialize in one type of fruit, others offer everything.




There are some pretty crazy looking fruits I'd never seen before. These furry guys look pretty cool. When you peel them, there's a fleshy center that looks sorta like a lychee and has a wood-like pit. Slightly sweet but mostly bland, they look cooler than they taste.


But the dominate fruit here is the Durian.

And by dominate I mean the one whose smell overpowers all others. When you crack one of these guys open, it releases an incredibly pungent, almost fermented-like smell.



The fleshy part is custard-like, and (I think) tastes as bad as it smells. You have to grab the fruit through a plastic bad hands or else your hand will smell like the fruit for days, but despite the fruit's difficulties it is quite popular.

When you buy the fruit, it comes sealed in a plastic container, but that does little to contain the smell. Taxi drivers won't let you bring the fruit in their cars, and hotels out right ban it.


Next to the fruit is the dry goods area.

Probably the weirdest thing you can get here is chicken or fish flossy.

I guess it's shredded meat that's been compressed into strands. They put it on top of baked goods, so you can get a bun filled with chicken curry and topped with flossy. It is both dry and chewy.

But you can get lots of other stuff here, like nuts, chips, candy and what not.











We're not even close to done seeing all there is. Next up are the baked goods.

It's all traditional Malay food, and the women selling their goods don't speak any English.

Some of this stuff is really good and some of it is REALLY weird. Since I can't really ask what anything is made of (and a lot of them come wrapped in banana leaves), I just try different things each time and hope for the best.



Along with baked goods, they also sell raw keropok lekor, considered Terengganu's signature delicacy. A guide book will tell you that keropok lekor is "a dumpling made with fish and sago flour, [that] unappetizingly resembles giant brown slugs when first prepared." This, I suppose, is as apt a description as an all-ages guide book can offer.

Keropok Lekor is prepared by either frying or boiling the slugs. I first tried one of these at the local night market, mistakenly assuming it to be some sort of fried dough stick, and was totally shocked by the strong fish flavor coupled with the inexplicable crunchy bits embedded throughout. I've since tried it again, knowing what to expect, but still don't like it even though it is hugely popular here in Terengganu.

Now let's move on to the vegetable area, which for whatever reason is not next to the fruit area.

Are you getting an idea of just how huge this place is?




For whatever reason, watermelon is sold with the vegetables, instead of fruit. They sell red watermelon and yellow watermelon. I didn't even know yellow watermelon was an option.


They also sell turtle eggs. I have yet to try these.


The last enclosed area of the wet market is the meat section. First up, seafood.


Fish, prawn and squid is what it's all about.










And now the chicken and beef area.





Also very popular: chicken feet and chicken liver.




And finally the last section is the open air market, where you can buy a lot of useless junk.