The streets are crowded with cars, small trucks and motorbikes. The sidewalks are porticos, stuffed with vendors, sellers of all manner of goods. The interiors of the shops are dark, inhabited by Chinese men and young girls, silently waiting there for customers.
You walk beneath the ceilings of the stores around bins of spices, redolent strong curries, fragrant cloves, sacks of drived anchovies in various sizes, hardware, tools and chainsaw parts. Men squat on the floor, working on engines, or fixing tools.
Other men sit in front of open cases, selling mysterious bottles of remedies, unknown things are in those bottles, and little packets of strange elixirs. Most of the shopkeeps are Chinese. In fact most of the signs above every doorway are in Chinese. Lun Fat Trading Co, Han Chu Manufacture. People gaze at their cellphones in the heat of the afternoon, sending text messages or talking quietly.
You pass by so many different types of stores all packed in close together. Men walk silently looking down at their phones, leaving the Friday prayers, wearing their skullcaps, waiting to light up a cigarette now that prayers are done.
The meats are laid out in big fatty strips, lying on a chest, flies buzzing on and off them, being shooed away by young boys. Chicken legs, yellow bright, are sitting in a container like pencils in a jar, another can contains severed chicken heads.
In a small town to the west of Kuching called Batanbong, we saw adult chickens packed into open crates, there was a little water in a bowl but it would have been hard for the birds to move that far to drink. Then another crate, this one with adolescent chickens, these teenagers were also packed mercilessly tight. And another with mere chicks, peeping, pecking, eating yellow powdery grain, a crate stuffed with chicks in the heat of the day.
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