The eve before Chinese New Year

For better or for worse, I've been more involved with the pre-Chinese New Year preparations in my house this year. I had to do so because my aged aunt, now almost 80 years old, has been laid low since about six weeks ago with a back problem. It is now almost impossible for her to do any heavy work in the house and certainly, her morning walks to the market must come to an end.

This leaves only me to go buy breakfast for her in the mornings and then at the same time, buy food for lunch and dinner as well. She's still well enough to potter around the house doing the less strenuous stuff, like cooking rice.

Of course, for the Chinese New Year, I have had to go marketing. Went there to pick up the foodstuff, especially for the CNY eve reunion dinner. One week ago, the ninth of February saw me there at the Kampung Baru market. Went there at six o'clock in the morning. Had been forewarned that people would already be there but I didn't expect the whole place to be bustling. In fact, if not for the fact that all of outside was still in pitch darkness, the activities looked completely normal to me. But the sky was still dark. And inside, everyone were milling around the traders, basked in only ceiling lights. Surprisingly though, nothing spooky about the feeling. The festival air was there.

So I moved from stall to stall, taking in the activities and sometimes, joining in too to pick up a few needed requirements. I had my camera with me to capture the scenes and despite not using the flash, some of the pictures did turn out quite decent. Such as these:

The above four pictures were taken of the main area of the wet market. Basically, the vegetable, fish and poultry sellers. Notice that outside the building, it was still pitch dark.

These two pictures were snapped at the separate building housing the pork sellers. There didn't seem to be any public lighting and the traders had either a generator set or chose to remain in the dark. And finally, there was this stall below which did a fantastically brisk business selling the Chinese New Year cakes.