Saturday. Beautiful day for visiting the Saturday Fish Market. My colleagues and friends Arie and Regen (they are at the end of the slides) picked me up at 5:30am (yes!!) and took me to the fish market. Their kids hate it because it is stinky!! If you are following my blog, you know I LOVE markets. Even stinky fish markets are fascinating and marvelous. I like the stinky fish smell. The water is amazing–so blue/green. The fishing boats are in the harbor and their captains are beautifully displaying their catch. Who doesn’t love that!!!

NOTE: DO NOT SCROLL THROUGH THESE PICTURES IF YOU ARE DISTURBED BY REAL IMAGES OF PROCESSED/PROCESSING/DEAD ANIMALS. I DID EMBED IMAGES INTO SLIDES THAT MIGHT BE DISTURBING TO SOME SO YOU CAN STILL READ THE COMMENTS.

Can you smell the stinky fish yet? If not, I have some pictures that will put you right there in middle of the market. I hope these make you feel part of the ambiance. As you can see the cats love the Saturday Fish Market too (second pic). The best way to keep that fresh fish smell is to keep them alive while you are selling them. They keep the fish in these cute little pools (third pic).

The first noticeable catch this week was the number of sharks. Shark is big business in Indonesia. They sell shark fin to China for shark fin soup and to the U.S., but I could not find what we use it for. They can get $42/pound for shark fin. That is big money. They are dried for selling so it takes a lot of sharks to get the ONE fin they cut off the back. The fisherman I talked to about how many I saw said, “It’s just shark week.” Little does he know there really is a Shark Week (U.S. TV show for those of you who might not know). Many fisherman cut off the much valued fin and drop the sharks back into the ocean. Nothing goes to waste here, so you can see in the pictures the shark are cut up to sell for their meat. I include all these pictures only so you can see the scale of shark fishing in this one market. This is not the only market. The 3 of us thought catching and selling sharks is illegal in Indonesia. I could not find anything to support this idea. There was some legislation against it, but the law expired in 2020.

The U.S. House put forward a law in 2022 (Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act) banning shark fin imports into the U.S., which might be good, because oceanic shark and ray populations have declined by more than 70% over the last 50 years. The fisherman rely on catching and selling stingrays too. It is illegal to kill manta rays. Even if there are laws against harvesting organisms, the government does not really have the manpower to keep up with what is happening on every boat and in every fish market. Remember they are an archipelago of over 14,000 islands. Can you imagine trying to govern that many places?

If you are so inclined you can also get octopus and squid at the market. I will not even start on the issues with collecting wild octopus. You know they have to eat something! This is where conservation and ecological beliefs rub against the reality of living.

Fish and mollusks are not the only grocery items available. The brown things are sugar they process. You can purchase some great looking chickens–yep I did–and some really good eggs. I asked for 12 eggs, but they sell them as 16–which is not a baker’s dozen (13 eggs). I always wondered why it was called a baker’s dozen. I thought it was so if the baker broke one they had an extra egg. Nope it’s about bread. Britannica says the following about a baker’s dozen: “In medieval England, there were laws that related the price of bread to the price of the wheat used to make it. Bakers who were found to be “cheating” their customers by overpricing undersized loaves were subject to strict punishment, including fines or flogging. Even with careful planning it is difficult to ensure that all of your baked goods come out the same size; there may be fluctuations in rising and baking and air content, and many of these bakers didn’t even have scales to weigh their dough. For fear of accidentally coming up short, they would throw in a bit extra to ensure that they wouldn’t end up with a surprise flogging later.”

To end on a happier note, this Javanese woman (from the island of Java) selling bananas is beautiful in her traditional headdress. I think she is wearing a blangkon. Her eyes are not a color I have seen. You cannot tell from the pictures but her eyes are really cool. It was 86 degrees with a feels like of 99 when I saw her and she was in a coat.