Snakes in a market

Since I've told this story to a couple of people now, I may as well repeat it here:

There's a little alleyway off the main street in El Barrio Chino, quite shady in both senses of the word. The alleyway serves as a produce market where one can get all sorts of Chinese vegetables, including (as I've mentioned earlier) my favorite kongxincai. They also have excellent, fresh tofu made daily (although it usually sells out by 3 pm), and sometimes fish in the mornings. There's also a fruit vendor, from whom I buy kiwis, and who I will talk about later in this blog.

I was talking with the fruit vendor last Tuesday, when some guy starts pulling out this long, taut, but slightly curled thing from a large rice sack. It keeps coming out, and three guys join in to pull the thing out. People start murmuring in the market, when they realize it's a giant boa constrictor. The guys seem to inspect it for a while (I was maybe 20 meters away -- no pictures, sorry), before putting it back into the rice sack and leaving it near the entrance of the alleyway market, on the ground.

As I walk out, I notice that there are a couple more rice sacks with the boa constrictor sack, lying haphazardly on the ground, their contents unknown.