Strangely, it took me approximately three weeks to realize that I’m actually taller than nearly everyone around me. Here’s the set-up: it’s Sunday morning, and I have exactly zero plans for the entire day. Sigh. Museums, cathedrals and the like are closed, and I skipped the Saturday night revelry with school people, so I wasn’t in the know. 

The host parents, Miguel and Nanci, ask if I’d like to go to the market with them. YES! Nanci and I hop into a combi, a type of 15-passenger van that would be the exact opposite of “pimped out” and we arrived at the San Sebastian Market in less than 10 minutes.

Immediately, I was enthralled, partially because I was the only gringo in sight. This was a market for real people, not for tourists! Hooray! Some sights were enough to make this gringa a bit queasy: old Quechua women whacking away at whole pigs with giant butchers’ knives, the heads, feet, intestines, and stomachs of said pigs in e. coli-producing piles on rickety wooden tables, giant tongues lolling about on tables, looking like they could only come from a creature from Where the Wild Things Are, etc.

More to my liking were the fruit/vegetable/potato/cheese aisles. And I’m talking aisles. There were twenty different women selling potatoes, each with giant bags probably weighing over 100 pounds. At an apple stand, a young girl was practically hidden by apples! That’s kind of like my own personal fairy tale. There were probably upwards of 100 sellers, and the food was so cheap. You could buy 1 kilo of apples for s/1.50, or two pounds of apples for 50 cents.

The family that I live with spent less than s/ 50 at the market, enough for food for the week for four people, buying fish, cheese, lettuce, kale, potatoes (a super special kind!), apples, oranges, bananas, luchuma, beets, carrots, and a few other things I can’t remember. They only went to the supermarket for a certain type of cheese and onions; they won’t buy most of their food there because it isn’t fresh, and of course, it’s more expensive.

Interesting that in the United States, farmer’s markets are almost exclusively the domain of the rich, and here, for everyone. The Peruvian daily diet is definitely carb-heavy (potatoes, rice, bread), but the food is fresh and unprocessed. I’d venture to guess that much of it is also organic. Although it might be a status symbol to shop in a grocery store; I’m not sure how those dynamics work.

Oh, how the San Pedro market put Pike’s Place Market to shame!