Another Vignette:

As my friend and I walked down the busy streets of downtown Vancouver, we encountered the Chinatown district.  Stepping over wilting vegetable leaves of a foreign variety on the sidewalk, we pass the produce displays and enter into a market of sorts specializing in a vast array of dried sea creatures.  The smell, while horrendous, tells of a cultural divide that goes mostly unnoticed.  We browse the market, commenting on various outlandish products and then exit into the bustling streets once again.  A few steps down the sidewalk we hear before we see a woman standing over a crate of live, squirming prawns, yelling at the top of her lungs in her native tongue.  She’s a woman of enterprise dealing in the tastes of china, plucked fresh from the seas of the Pacific Northwest.  A few more steps down the street we pass the mouth of an alleyway in which a small group of young Asian boys are threading dowels into the folds of a colorful kite.  A crate of identical kite kits sits on its side spilling its contents into the alley behind them.  These boys are servants of commerce also just like the market worker and the prawn saleswoman.  The life that is sustained within this web of trade is as different as anything I’ve ever experienced yet no less profound.