Four Off-the-Wall Asian Shopping Experiences

Asia’s food markets can be an intense sensory experience, from live fish down to gorgeous spices. But there’s more to markets than exotic fruit and spices. Here’s four Asian shopping experiences you should definitely try, for an insight into the culture more than anything.

1: Carrefour, China

There’s no better way to see how different a culture is from your own than heading to a major brand supermarket and seeing how very differently they do things. The typical Chinese Carrefour features a live fish market, where you catch your own with a net, box after box of luxury teas to be picked by hand, solid walls of MSG for cooking, and an unnecessary quantity of chicken claw. The meat section brings a new style to the term “nose-to-tail eating”.

2: Tomohon Market, Sulawesi, Indonesia

The Minahasa people of North Sulawesi will eat everything – from lizard to snake, from bats to rats, and even the critically endangered tarsier. (And, no, you don’t get much meat off those little creatures.) For an insight into what people will eat, and some spectacularly gory snacks, from rats on sticks to butchered dogs, bus from Manado, in north Sulawesi. Or read ManontheLam’s tour here.

3: Pantip Plaza, Thailand

Forget Singapore’s Sim Lim Square – unless the saving on the GST refund makes up for the increased costs of being in Singapore. Pantip Plaza, giant electronics malls with outlets in Chiang Mai and Bangkok, are a quintessentially Asian shopping experience – with stalls of all sizes from legitimate resellers to one-man bands. If getting products mended here, it’s wise to keep an eye on the process so that the correct parts are used – or just wander and wonder at the myriad bargain electronics.

4: The Animal & Flower Market, Istanbul

This one is technically only just in Asia, sure. But if you’re looking for an Istanbul shopping experience less, umm, manicured than the Grand Bazaar or the Spice Bazaar, head round the back of the Spice Bazaar into the whirlpool of weird that is Istanbul’s Animal and Flower Market. Expect everything from fish to puppies to leeches and cacti – and isn’t surprise the point of travel?