East Meets West (2)

Less than 2 blocks from our apartment is something that the tourist map calls the Market of Odd Stone. First you come to a series of shops selling stones, odd and otherwise - fossils, geodes, hunks of water-chiseled limestone, gemstones of various sorts. Then comes the market area. First are plants and gardening supplies. There are tools, hoses, buckets of pebbles, containers of fertilizer, house plants, ornamental plants, pots. After the botanical come the zoological: pets and pet supplies, live creatures destined to become food for bigger creatures, and other odd things. The pets - baby rabbits, parakeets, canaries - are kept in very small cages, actually flat wire boxes. You really hope that they find homes soon before they suffer irreversible mental and physical anguish due to crowding. Then there are the invertebrates - larvae of some sort sticking out of their cocoons (pardon me, entomologists, I know not of what I speak), wriggling arthropods, small fish, crickets. Given the nature of our neighborhood as the gateway to (one of the) upscale shopping areas, it's an interesting study in contrasts.