There are two fantastic markets mere steps from our apartment. One happens on Friday night, and Andrew loves it because he gets home early from work and we bee-line over there. We’ve already made friends with the olive-sellers and we’re working on the bread guy. Last week we bought a cheese at the fromagerie called “Madame Cheese.” It wasn’t very good, but it was worth it for the name.
The other market is on Tuesday mornings, and I go to that one by myself. This market is much bigger than the Friday afternoon one, and is sort of overwhelming. The market takes up about four blocks, and is jam packed with people, stalls and goods. People, both customers and merchants seem to conduct all business at the level of a “shout” and they all seem to know the secret market code that I’m still trying to decipher.
It’s a colourful and lively place. There is one vast table filled with olives, sun dried tomatoes, pickles, cashews, almonds, raisins. Basically if you can soak it in oil, vinegar or salt, it’s there. I, of course, buy nothing from this tempting table in order to preserve my friendship with the Friday Night Market Olive People. (I’m not sure if it can actually be considered a friendship if I refer to them as my FNMOP’s, but I’m grasping at straws here).
There are also stalls devoted to household goods – they sell everything from towels, pillows and bed linens to toothpaste, clocks, and alarmingly, toilet seats.
There’s a gorgeous flower and plant stall. The owner lines up buckets and buckets of tulips, roses and lilies and intersperses them with enormous pots of mums and now, poinsettias. This creates a bright colourful floral pocket in the midst of the market frenzy.
There are a half a dozen stalls devoted to selling vegetables. The produce is spread out all over long tables and you have to attract the attention of the dude behind the counter to order. This is difficult because he is usually shouting, in French and Flemish about what his wares are, what his prices are and how fresh everything is.
The veggie markets have absolutely every fruit and vegetable under the sun, including bananas and pineapples, which make me suspect that not everything is grown locally. Belgian weather, while certainly warmer than Canadian, is not tropical, unless Global Warming has somehow reversed the meaning of meteorological terms and “freezing drizzle” is the new “tropical.”
Along with the suspicious “local” fruit are lots of genuinely regional fruits and veggies like very yummy apples and the ubiquitous endive, which the Belgian seem to slip into EVERYTHING, including, possibly, ice cream. Surprisingly, however, I see few Brussels spouts.
Last Tuesday, I made a fatal error. I had attempted to buy some veggies from one of the stalls, but was completely unsuccessful in catching the guy’s eye. After a minute or two of waving my eggplant at the merchant, I gave up and wandered away.
I think that dispiriting failure lowered my defences (or intelligence) so when I saw a dirty, unshaven, and possibly drunk man selling eggs, I thought, “Hey, I should buy his eggs.” Instead of, “Huh, I might need a tetanus shot if I go near him.”
The Egg Man had a strange set-up. Usually merchants take enormous pride in their stalls – photos of their products are pasted to the walls, some have little quotations or even dried flowers. Anything to make their goods look attractive and bring in the customers. The egg man didn’t even have a stall. There was his truck, in which he obviously transported his eggs, given the yolk stains I could see on the floor, there were his eggs, which were piled up in enormous open-faced cartons, and there was him, large, unshaven, and morose, on a stool.
I’m used to super market eggs, which are all one colour and one shape. Their very uniformity lulls you into thinking that they came off some clean, antiseptic assembly line, rather than a chicken’s nether-regions. These eggs didn’t do that. They were all sizes and colours – big, little, brown, white-ish. What’s more, many were covered in well, what I hoped was dirt, but suspected was something more chicken-related.
At this point it was too late for me, however. As soon as I had stopped in front of the Egg Man, he had begun shouting. “You want these? How many will you take?” He was already loading the eggs into a bag. I felt trapped and stammered that I’d take half a dozen.
“I don’t sell in dozens. You’ll take twenty.”
My mind boggled. Who doesn’t sell eggs by the dozen? Isn’t it a law of nature, like lions eating zebras, apples falling down, not up and Britney Spears attaching herself to skanky people? (Seriously, she got rid of K-Fed and is now cavorting with Paris Hilton. The hell?!?)
Anyway, without waiting for a response, he placed twenty of his eggs into a bag (not even giving me a carton!) and thrust it at me. “That’s two euros fifty.”
I only had a twenty.
After much sighing, huffing, and rooting through all of the many, many many pockets of his coveralls he counted me out my change, mostly in one euro pieces.
I left the Egg Man’s stall feeling bewildered. How had I been bullied into buying twenty eggs I didn’t want? Worse, when I got home I realised the little weasel had short-changed me.
Still, after I washed those puppies off, I made an omelette. And you know what? They were the best damn eggs I’ve ever had. Now that I’ve tasted a genuinely fresh egg, I don’t think I can go back to sterile, boring supermarket eggs. I’m now an Egg Man devotee… Only, next time I’ll bring exact change.
Part Two of Market Share will be coming on Monday.
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