Anytime's The Right Time

I took this picture at what is quickly becoming my FAVORITE place to bring "tourists" (read: I brought my mom there when she came to visit last week, and my dad while he was here this week, why the double-header visit I don't know). Anyway so it's a Chinese grocery around the block from me. Here's why this gross-ery is the place to be.
1. You are not supposed to be there.
2. It looks just like normal people grocery stores, except nothing makes sense and you don't want to eat any of it.
3. It's stinky (read below to see why...)
4. There are flies everywhere (again, the reason is below)
5. The "meat counter" doesn't have any of that fancy American wrapped meat or glass cases, it is more like the produce department, one is supposed to pull one of those vegetable bags off the spool and fill it with their favorite room temperature meat. Just try to fight through the old ladies shoving fist-fulls of fly covered chicken FEET (which by the way are the most expensive part of the bird) into their bags.
6. The fishmonger. Behind him is a veritable aquarium of live fish swimming around, when you choose the fish you want, he scoops it out with his net, bludgeons it with his hammer, and cuts it up for you. Also if you are one of the lucky few to see a tank teeming with live shrimp or prawns you will make a vow on the spot never to eat those sea-spiders again. Behind him too is a tank with something labeled in English as duck, but is a clam shell about the size of a dessert plate, with a HUMONGOUS Phallus pouring out of it, nay, standing at attention. But don't let the fish monger distract you from the main event, which you could trip over if you want to star in a horrible horrible nightmare you never before imagined. So by all means remember to look down. First is the bucket with the mesh on top, and when you look down there are huge live toads bright green and brown slimely crawling all over each other. And you think wow that's pretty bad, so you look in the next bucket with the mesh top, only to find EVEN BIGGER monster toads, the size of a baby's head. After being horrified by the first two buckets, you see the third one, the one with no mesh on the top, and you think it can't be as bad as the first two, because the "food" is obviously not going to jump out at you. But that's when you find out you're wrong, because in the third bucket are live bloody piles of dinner plate sized "soft shell" turtles. It took me two visits to even figure out that is what they were. They look like monsters. They are so gross that I want the monger to crush them with his hammer, I want them to die. Anyway the blood monsters are pretty much the highlight of the tour, and at that point you want to run anyway.
So next time you're in San Francisco give me a jingle, and I'll show you what's what.