Bali market scene

This morning I got up at 6am to go to market at 7 am with one of the cooks here, in order to buy fresh vegetables, herbs and spices for the cooking lesson we were going to have later today. Here's a view from above looking down on the market, a very busy colourful affair. Apparently the market wares are brought to market by 2 am, market is in full flow by 4 am and finishes at 11 am. The market sellers are all women, the cook said their menfolk are probably at home taking care of the rest of the household and cooking !

It's an open air market, even though the stalls are all around a specially designed building for the market, but this is like so many buildings in Bali, mostly a roof construction held up by pillars and open sides, to make the most of any breeze.
Not only vegetables, fruits, offering wares and flowers are sold there, also fish and meats. There are no fans and no way to use air conditioning with all these open sides, so it will be hard to keep the meats and fish cool and clean. The cook told me the restaurant will not buy meats and seafood from these markets, to my relief!

The cooking lesson this afternoon was fun too, we made Soto Ayam, Indonesian spicy chicken soup, a prawn curry and a dessert from rice flour flavoured and coloured by pandan paste with a gula melakka (brown sugar) filling. Quite a lot of dicing, chopping and blending
to be done and DJ, who does not cook ever, proved to be rather handy with a knife, must remember that :-) It all tasted great !

Thank you all so much for your kind comments, stars and hearts for yesterday's lotus flowers, you are so kind ! The internet is rather iffy this afternoon and night, I've been trying to post this for three hours now. So I hope you don't mind if the rest of the replies and comments will be done tomorrow when I'm hoping for a better connection.