You call those apples?

My host mother goes to the bazaar every day. This could be because we don't keep our refrigerator turned on and thus all food must be replenished each day, but I think most Georgians make daily trips to the bazaar anyway. Some of the fruits and vegetables can also be found in the grocery stores, but it's always the little bruised ones, and the price is always jacked up. Sixty cents for a kilo of apples? No thanks.

I venture into the bazaar significantly less often. It's not because I get lost, which I do-- though now I know my way out if I can find the fish market-- rather, it's because I rarely get the opportunity to test out my new cooking-from-scratch techniques, and thus I don't really need to buy a kilo of carrots for no reason. I used to use carrots as meal substitutes during the long bread-and-cheese winter, but that's hardly the same. Sometimes I like to pop on over and pick up a kilo or two of fruit, but then due to Georgian customs of communal ownership, my host family ends up eating most of it as I frown at them from the living room, longing for my homeland and the Western traditions of self-reliance/selfishness.

The best part about the bazaar is the surprises within-- will I find what I'm looking for, or has it gone out of season in the two weeks since I was last here? Did they sell out of it already? Is the bazaar even open? You never know. One week you're noting to yourself how there's thick black cherries for sale on every corner, the next you're digging through the lost cobwebby corners of the bazaar in search of the last pile of withered, gooey cherries. For example, check out the variety in the following picture. Can you label the apples, pears, oranges, bananas, mandarins, lemons, kiwis, pomegranates, grapes and persimmons? A sticker for all ten correct.



And of course, there's the haggling. Personally, I feel a great sense of capitalist guilt when haggling with bazaar ladies who are just trying to earn enough tetri to buy cheese for their families that day, so unless they're charging me a dollar per grape, I'll usually pay it. This, of course, is not including GREAT MOMENTS IN BAZAAR HISTORY #1: The day when I haggled the price of bananas down from 70 tetri a piece to 35. I made banana bread; it was delicious except for where I hadn't mixed it properly and there were chunks of baking soda.



Another problem is that, strangely, all the wares are labeled in Georgian, and by "labeled" I mean that the saleswoman tells me what they're called in Georgian. I usually just stare stupidly at a row of spice bags until someone asks me what I'm looking for, to which I tell them in Georgian that I don't know the word, but that it goes on chicken. It's good practice for improvisational cooking.



Sometimes you don't even have to go into the bazaar to find your fruit and veggies. There's usually a trail of fruit vendors outside the market, selling produce at an even lower fare, which seems impossible given that you can get two kilos of mandarins for one lari ($.70) even inside the bazaar. This probably has something to do with the presence of Ladas filled with mandarins. Mandarin-filled Ladas drive back and forth across the western side of Georgia, pouring forth their wares for whatever change you can fish out of your pocket. Since Russia doesn't buy Georgian mandarins anymore, there's quite the mandarin surplus; last year they had to dump a few tons into the Black Sea. Thus, mandarin-mobiles in the west, occasionally stopping by to trade with apple-mobiles from the east.



A final side note: this is a quince. The alphabet poster in our classroom has "Q is for Quince" written on it, and for 19 months I've wondered what the crap kind of made-up word that was. Now, I know: it's a grainy, tart fruit. And knowing is half the battle.

G.I. Joe!