De compras

Yesterday after class I walked down Juan Jaramillo to the part where it ends, at the Diez de Agosto market. It´s a huge, two story white building, encasing a sprawling indoor market where ¨soup to nuts¨ doesn´t even begin to describe the variety of choices you have when you buy. Raul got in lots of subjunctive practice with his exhortations that I avoid the meat section, but unfortunately, at times, the meat section comes to you. As when I almost bumped into a man who dangled an entire side of beef (legs were still involved) off his left shoulder while heading for the escalator.

The produce section is actually three sections. Most of your fruit is downstairs, including baskets of tree tomatoes and at least four different kinds of bananas. Leafier stuff is upstairs: the carrots are terrifying, fat as apples at one end and tapering down to inch-thick ¨points¨. Another area altogether is for beans, choclo corn, and cooked grains. Every few feet is another family´s stall, and since the sellers have nothing but time as they wait for people to buy their wares, all the pea-shelling and garlic peeling is already done for you.

The best aisle, in my opinion, is the herb section: wiry old ladies and surprisingly spry gentlemen selling pile after pile of various plants. It´s all jumbled together, chamomile and borage, purple stalks of amaranth on top of mint bundles--you tell them what´s wrong and they throw things together to match. Flu remedies are the most popular, but rumor has it they also make potions for lovesickness and luck. The smell of all those mingled herbs is absolutely luscious: I wanted to just pay the vendors a couple bucks to look away while I jumped on the piles and rolled around the stalls.

I ended out spending about 7 dollars, for:
-half pound of white beans
-half pound of shelled peas
-sack of choclo kernals
-four tomatoes
-bag of strawberries
-four tiny bananas
-red pepper
-bunch of chard
-cilantro
-parsley
-bag of cooked barley
-half pound of boiled yucca
-two onions
-two heads of garlic
and a bag of peeled fava beans.

And speaking of food, it´s time for lunch now. I´m going to be cooking my dinners, obviously, but lunch specials in Cuenca are hard to beat, and I need a nice table to spread out my homework. On the menu today: motepillo, which is a local speciality of mote (basically, hominy) scrambled with spices and eggs. ¡Buen provecho!