Mercado Central

Today I'm going to take you on an adventure. You don't have to put on your seat belt (don't worry, I wear one whenever possible, even though it's rare to find a taxi driver who wears theirs here). We're going to walk through small urban streets, a few food vendors on either side, and around the corner we can faintly hear the thumping music from multiple radios. We've found the mercado, or market. On the outside, it looks like a maze, with many passageways and too many vendors to count (though not nearly as intimidating as the grand bazaar in Istanbul. Don't worry, this is manageable. After all, this is only Anaco.

Imagine a large football field-sized market area, with aluminum covered open-sided buildings each holding different varieties of food or produce.

As we enter the market, the first thing we notice is all of the produce, with the bold smell of fresh pineapple and guava almost smacking you on the face when you step up onto the hard concrete.  This part of the market is divided solely by long skinny tables, overflowing with lettuce, tomatoes, green onions, carrots, bananas, papayas, limes, passion fruit, guavas, and pretty much every kind of melon, and multiple men and women behind each shouting (however lovingly) to come to their table to buy their produce. 

To buy this lovely food, you put as much as you want in plastic bags, then eventually hand it to them, and they weigh it all together on hanging scales. They then estimate how much they want to charge you for it. A whole weeks worth of veggies and fruit to fill up a backpack and both of my hands costs a total of about 170bs, or a little under six dollars.The bags are heavy, and pockets only slightly lighter, but still full of bills, because the smallest bill here is 2 bs (or about 12 cents)

As you wonder further into the market, the aroma overwhelms you, pescado. (or pfish as my three year olds would say). Here you can also buy as much meat or fish as you want- I only bought chicken. It is actually cheaper to buy the whole chicken (already de-feathered but whole body in tact minus the head and feet.. but don’t worry, they sell the feet), a whole chicken costing a gringa like me a whole 1$. Though the currency exchange makes everything extremely cheap for me, for Venezuelans it doesn’t necessarily make everything as cheap (depending on how much they get paid or their wages have changed with inflation).

Most likely we will also grab a bite to eat at the mercado, from one of over 50 kiosks, all selling empenadas, tequenos, arepas, or another deep fried Venezuelan delicacy.. Yesterday we had empanadas, a deep fried pastry filled with a meat of your choice, we had chicken. We also had some freshly made passion fruit juice..mmmmmm.

The walk to the market, which was a little over half an hour, helps to burn some of the built up calories  from the empenadas and overly-sugared “natural” juice.But don't worry, on the way home we'll take a taxi.. that half a water-melon the size of both my femurs is pretty heavy.

I hope that you can see the colors of this market. The blood from the chicken stained lightly on the counters of the chicken market, the brown grit on the ground of all of the left-over fruits and vegetables trampled on by soft flip flops, day after day. The stark contrast of fresh watermelons piled in the back of a pick-up truck, to the fly-covered dried fish with a name I don’t understand and am not yet brave enough to try.

The market is a place of colors, of smells beyond your imagine (and no mom, not nearly as poor of smells as Dhaka.. only the potent smell of fish), and of joyous noise. Young kids run around chasing each other and offering you large plastic bags to carry all of your produce for a mere two or four Bs.

I hope you enjoyed your time at the market, now to make some watermelon juice! Ciao!