Tuesday Market

Food is expensive in Lusaka.

Or maybe it is just expensive to feed a family of six, especially if you don't plan to just eat nshima and relish (the local staple - nshima is dish made from maize flour and water and - you know what, if you really want to know, check out the nshima wikipedia page).  Relish in this case is some green leafy vegetable (we like Chinese cabbage for ours) boiled with tomato and onion.

Anyway, we found that many locals, especially those who run restaurants, buy their produce from the Tuesday Market. The Tuesday Market is a produce market at the St. John's Anglican Church, where you will find the freshest, cheapest fruit and vegetables in town!

When I first heard about the market, I was a little bit leery, especially of bringing the little ones there. I read this blog post (which has some great pictures of the market - you should visit the blog just to see the pics, even if for no other reason).

Anyway, arriving at the Tuesday market is a little daunting. When you get near to the market, you are swarmed with boys, all wanting to "help" you park. Whether you get in the church compound or not, they will swarm the car, wanting to carry your bag or watch the car. We've found that the best situation is picking two of the boys, one to watch the car and one to carry the shopping bag. We usually look for the same two, Jonathan for the car and Douglas to carry the bag. Still, the swarm is a bit hard to handle - and once, while we were being swarmed and trying to get the little ones out of their car seats, someone got in the front of the car and swiped my iPod. :-(

But once you choose (and tell the others that you've made your choice and "maybe next time" always works nicely for this), then you're pretty much left alone to go inside and peruse the rows and rows of fresh produce. When I say fresh, I don't mean produce aisle fresh. I mean, this is the real deal. No preservatives or added color or wax or whatever they do to produce to make it look good in US stores. And piles of food.

We have started to get our bearings; we always go to one guy for apples and another woman for pineapples. Certain vendors have better products, and certain ones have better prices. You simply ask for a price, maybe haggle, and then tell them how much you want or pick what you want. They will weigh it, usually with a small hand-held scale, and tell you what you owe and you pay. Cash. And the boy you hired carries it.

The first time we went, we had Matthew in the stroller, which was a bad move, because the stroller was too wide for the tiny aisles. So now I wear him in the backpack carrier. Locals love to see him up there, and to see his Dad carrying him... that's just a bonus! We buy tomatoes, red, yellow, and green peppers (and maybe some hot peppers), lettuce, Chinese cabbage, lemons, pineapple, watermelon, apples, carrots, celery, onions, potatoes, garlic, cilantro (they call it coriander here), and even spices (we steer toward the ones in the front that are already packaged rather than from the big bags!). Pretty much anything you want is here, as long as it's in season.

Then we pay the boy who carried our bags (we usually pay k10, which is like $1.50) and the boy who watched our car (k5: less than $1), and they are happy and so are we!

So now you know what we do on Tuesday mornings!