About the food here

For days I have been planning on writing a post about how damn good and fresh and cheap the food is here, how amazing the markets and little shops--all in walking distance, all relatively cheap--are, and then the other night G got really sick. And, most likely, the bug that kept running between bed and the bathroom for hours of attempted expurgation before we finally embarked for medical help in the middle of the night came from lettuce he’d bought at the market that day.

The central market where he went is labyrinthine and exciting and reminds me of Cairo or Damascus or maybe even parts of Beirut. There is an outdoor section, where people vend wares on blankets, under umbrellas. Then stalls, made of soft wood, set up under roofs of tarps and corrugated metal. A woman sells batteries, a man sells dried beans out of baskets, a woman sells tomatoes that she has piled in pyramids, and on and on. Then the food section, where a woman sells tamales, some women work behind ovens, scraping at piles of meat, and mysteriously brightly colored drinks in large clear plastic containers, large chunks of ice floating. And all over tiny stools to sit and eat at. Then there is the indoor part, all white ceramic tile and the smell of raw meat--a fish section, a pork section, a beef section. Any part you want. Cow head, anyone?

Besides that, there are tiny stalls a few blocks down the hill from our house, where a handful of vegetables and fruits are on display.

Then there are the special, the organic, the house-made things: a twice weekly organic market in the courtyard of an arts center just down the block where a few vendors sell healthy-looking greens, juicy berries, colorful roots, golden-yolked eggs, the handful of pink lily-looking flowers that still smell fresh after a few days on our dining room table. And a dairy shop, also down the street, where they sell all sorts of cheeses and raw yogurt, their amazing pineapple flavor in our fridge right now. Tangy and sweet and sour all at once. And a coffee place downtown, that's all fair-trade and organic and delicious, where the woman had us try raw cocoa beans when we bought our half kilo last week.

G's sickness lasted a very painful eight hours. It was the kind of sick where you feel like you might die, I think like the way I felt in Egypt that time after the koshary in the desert--or was it that time after the baba at the fancy Lebanese place? It was awful. But now after finding a decent all-night clinic, getting a shot, and taking some pills, the thing that possessed him is gone, and we're eating normally again. Big meal in the middle of the day, amazing smells coming from the kitchen now, as you see pictured above.

Meandering post, I know. Just trying to get some fluency going. Stuck on an awful short story rewrite these past couple days. It's killing me. Or at least it feels like it.