The Mercado

Part Two of my great Saturday....

After the volleyball tournament on Saturday, Miguel took us to the mercado to do some shopping.  The mercado is like a HUGE outdoor mall that sells anything and everything (almost).  Everyone sets up shop outside under little tents and there are tiny little aisles to walk down and pick out goods.  Many people have warned us how dangerous the mercado can be simply because there are a lot of people and it's easy for them to rob you.  Thankfully, we had Miguel leading us and Aleksi bringing up the rear to make sure no one messed with the three gringas.

First, we headed to the fruit district.  I'm glad we had Miguel because none of us knew what good fruit was supposed to look like (well, the new fruits).  We'd been paying about 1 sol for a mango and at the mercado we got five for 2 soles!  That's five mangoes for less than a dollar.  Can't find that in the states!  We also bought some avocados (3 for 1 sol) and bananas.

We went to a guitar shop for Brittany.  She didn't get one but we'll probably go back this week so she can (they only accept cash).  We also went to a fabulous yarn store where we got oodles of yarn for the girls to crochet with.  It was sooooo cheap.  Everything here is cheap.  Well anything not American is cheap.

Luckily, we didn't get hit with any water balloons during the day!  As it gets closer to Carnival, I get more anxious about going outside in the city.  We also managed to not get robbed OR have our feet run over by a car as we were walking.  I'm excited to go back to the mercado a different day and spend some time looking around instead of just shuffling from one place to another in an efficient manner to buy everything we needed.

This is similar to where we were although not the exact one.

Saturday afternoon we all took a two hour nap (an hour more than we had allotted for naps) and then headed to Banos del Inca for a nice hot shower.  Ahhhhhhh I love hot showers.  On the way back from the shower we stopped and bought bread from our favorite bread lady and headed back home.  We were asleep before 9:00.

PS (6/21/2012) Brittany took a picture in the mercado that I just found so I'm adding it onto here.