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Fish Market
After going to bed this morning at 2 AM, I woke up again at 6 AM.
The mission: to attend the fish market that occurs every Mon-Fri morning
at Aberdeen Harbour.
The reason: according to our program directory, Mr. Graham Trengove, no
American students on the GLCA program have ever made it to the fish
market, mostly due to its temporal location. As well, the Aberdeen fish
market supplies much of the European fish trade, and if you go in a
restaurant in Great Britain and they advertise a "local catch", it is
still most likely that it comes from Aberdeen.
We arrived around 7 AM to see the sun rising over the harbour and the
ships unloading their cargo. We were quite out of place, two university
students milling around all these hard-core fisherman (only saw one woman)
who had been at sea for days. I looked particularly foreign with my
camera and zoom lens.
THOUSANDS of fish everywhere inside a huge warehouse right on the water.
We saw Herring and Cod and Shrimp and Crab and lots of other North Sea
fish. They were all stacked in bins of about 50 or so (except for the
really huge fish, only 3 or 4 per bin), in rows across the warehouse.
Each row had one bin turned over with the fish spilled out on the floor so
that the quality of the fish on the bottom could be inspected.
By the time all the fish were loaded into the warehouse, hundreds of
trucks had arrived and the auctioning began. I mainly noticed two very
loud men shouting out indecipherable things to the bidders standing around
on a particular row of fish. They bid by winking or nodding or waving,
and a few times I think Anna and I came pretty close to buying ourselves
some fish.
Each species has a base price to start, and then the bidding goes up from
there. According to a police officer who filled us in at length about the
proceedings, they would pay around 40 pounds (US$60) for one bin of fish.
Once the bins are bought, the purchaser puts lots of labels with the
company name on it all over the bins and then the workers start dragging
them in to the trucks. Monday through Friday, every morning, that's what
those folks do.
Not exactly a life-changing experience for Anna or I, but certainly a
novelty that was well worth seeing, and I got lots of good pictures. I
don't think the fish were quite as satisfied.
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