Mercado Central

This post was supposed to go up later tonight, but Peter and I are waiting for Alex and Tito to contact us. We've been waiting three hours now and have nothing better to do, so I killed time by writing this.

Due to the move and other fun complications we really haven't been making that much food. Either we eat out or nosh on bananas (30 cents a pound!) or cereal or something. Faced with two more mouths and a lot more time on our hands getting groceries has increasingly become a priority. There are a grocery stores in the region, but they're small, crowded, and expensive. If you want good food you go to Mercado Central.

Mercado Central is not a supermarket but a super market, a bazaar spanning five city blocks. If you can't find it here, it either doesn't exist or is banned by the government. Note that the inverse is not true. I think I found a stand selling unicorn blood. It's not just food and restaurants. Two vendors were selling kitchenware, one shop carried bikes, and at least three casinos stood in plain sight.

But we didn't come here for the tea kettles. The big attraction is the food. These shops are just two in a legion of produce stores built in formation. Everywhere you go baskets of fruit and crates of vegetables line the walls. We didn't bother to count the number of places, but it was probably more than fifty. If somebody counted a hundred I wouldn't be surprised. And they're all incredibly cheap. We bought ten pounds of potatoes for two bucks. Combined with another five pounds of onions, carrots, and bananas getting home quite the challenge!

Spices are a little hard to track down. They're either sold in dry good stores like this one or in small unlabeled packets in the stands. Mostly you differentiated them by sight and smell. Easy for spices, not so much for herbs. I avoided doing it because I was worried about getting in trouble. I don't think people appreciate it when you jam a pack of powder up to your nose.

   

Tito and Alex never ended up showing. We ended up staying home and making lentil soup. I think that was the first real dish I ever learned to cook. It reminds me of warmth and home. Tomorrow we'll definitely be meeting up with the two, plus hopefully Malus and Arthur. I'm looking forward to it. It'll be nice to meet other people from the States.

Oh, and before I forget:

LLAMA LLAMA LLAMA