La Parada

Noah and I (Laura) had a neat cultural experience together on Saturday. Elita and her oldest son, Jimmy, took us by bus to THE market in Lima. It's apparently where most of the restaurants, little bodegas, and street vendors buy their vegetables and other groceries. The actual market itself is enormous, not to mention all the hundreds of people selling their wares on the surrounding streets. The size of a few football fields, it is open air with a dirt/mud floor. Half of it has the vegetables (but no fruit, that's another huge market to itself) and the other half has the groceries, meat, cheese, and grains. The first aisle we went down had just garlic. I have never seen so much garlic in my life - vendor after vendor (at least 40 of them) just selling garlic. They had is separated into size and age with corresponding prices. The garlic we chose, we paid 2 soles for 1 kilo - that's about 70 cents for 2.2 pounds. Elita and I decided to share what we would buy together, so I wrote down what we paid for everything and we divided it up later. And so it was - every aisle had it's own veggie, tomatoes, onions, limes, carrots, and of course potatoes, in fact there might have been a couple aisles of those.
It was incredible to me to see the people working there; families working the business. On the street before entering, I noticed a little girl, maybe 3 years old, asleep under the table of her family's store, head on a bag of corn with large plastic bags for her blankets. The potato workers all had their muddy hands. And the porters, the guys hired to carry or haul your items on a hand truck or their backs, worked so fast and hard - you really had to be careful if you were in their way - they couldn't always stop very easily with their heavy loads. Some looked to have been 60 years old or more, but all that hard work also may have prematurely aged them. All they wanted was about $1 to carry all your groceries. But instead, we had Jimmy. (c: His load started out light with just Noah on his shoulders, but as we bought more, I started carrying Noah and Jimmy had the big bags. It was about this time that I looked up instead of watching my step for tomatoes and rotten potatoes. I noticed how many faces were staring at Noah and me. I can pretty much guarantee that we were the only white people for at least a mile radius - it's just not the top tourist spot. How strange it must have been to see us there - by far the dirtiest place I've seen in Lima. I'm glad I didn't bring my camera. I would have felt like I was making a spectacle of what everyday life is for these people. Instead I was able to just buy my groceries for the week, granted with a little more difficulty than if I had had my pushcart at the supermarket.