Weekend and the Market

Other than this past weekend, I’ve had fairly low key weekends here so far. I like to walk down Sherriff St on Saturday morning and pick up a few things. There is some variety/grocery stores, a bakery, fish place and a Royal Chicken (kind of like KFC). One of the stores is set up with shelves behind bars. You order what you want at the cashier and they pick it up for you. I like the other one because I can pick things out and read their labels. I hesitate to call either of them grocery stores because the supply of fruits and vegetables is non-existent. There are other grocery stores that do have fruits and vegetables. Funny story – most of them are imported.

Luckily, there is the market. Kala took me the first time with another office worker and Navin drove of us. It’s about the length of a block with stands on either side forming a walkway in the middle. It started to rain and we only had one umbrella. Navin dropped us off and waited while the three of us took turns standing under the umbrella and tarps at the different stands. Kala introduced me to some vegetables and fruits that I have never seen and I got an idea of how market interactions work. I was catching up with the umbrella after buying carrots and apple bananas when a man dumped the water pooling on his tarp… on top of me! One half of me was completely soaked and then I laughed because what else could I do. As if I didn’t stand out enough in the market… I can go to the market with $1000 in my pocket (aka $5 CDN) and leave with change, and bags heavy from fruits and vegetables. One of my favourites to pick up is a small watermelon for $300 ($1.50CDN) and cut it up so that I have bags of fresh watermelon in the fridge. It is so red and sweet! Between Wallis and Kala, I have been introduced to bora [which looks like a long string bean and is used for flavouring in dishes (but Afrianda tells me that it will cause the food to sour if you keep any for leftovers)], sapodilla [which is a very unique fruit, a shell like a kiwi but not fuzzy with great big flat seeds inside, and the flesh is white and sweet and stringy, very good anyway) , pawpaw [just another word for papaya but I didn’t know for the longest time], and two other random fruits that I don’t remember the name of. I tried one which has a tough outside, but you bite it and suck on the pit. Usually it should be sweet but the one that I tried wasn’t ripe yet and tasted like a sour candy, so good in another way! The other was a bitter/tart berry that leaves a coating on your teeth. Oh wait! It’s called sorrel. Why do I remember? Because you don’t eat it, you use it to make juice and Wallis made me sorrel juice. It made me think of Christmas – the juice has Christmasy spices in it and the red berry became a very sweet, flavourful juice.

And yes, my last weekend adventure: There is nothing quite like taking a nap in the afternoon on a weekend under a mosquito net.

Can’t wait until market days this week! (Wednesday and Thursday).

Take care.