Groceries

Cafayate is cheap. It is not so third world that it needs to be this cheap. You can have a week’s fresh groceries for a tenner and all the wine you can neck down from the bodegas at the end of the road. Canned goods are more expensive as they have to be trucked in from afar.

Living in the middle of town there are supermarkets all around – what we would know as a seven elevens but without all the goods. A whole aisle of shelves can be stretched out with a few plastic washing up bowls and coloured plastic buckets. Cleaning is important here. Every day a thin film of sandy dust covers everything in the house. In the dry season of winter, it will be a thick film of red sand, turning the white porcelain of the bathroom suite into a dust bowl. Every day women are outside hosing down the pavement in front of their houses in an attempt to stop dust tracking into the house. It’s an ongoing battle against an enemy that slinks back in overnight or is whipped back in by a ten minute wind shower.

I go shopping at the market and choose between who has the nicest greenest vegetables that day. Everything is piled up unpackaged. The broccoli has been recently hacked low down from its stalk with all its blue leaves still attached. All my vegetables, fruit and salad is placed into one bag and a price totted up. I’m not going to quibble – it comes to less than a pound. I buy chicken in the same shop. The butcher smiles as I explain in Spanish that I want it boneless and skinless. Here they would eat the lot and give the rest to the dog. They wrap six eggs in a row inside two sheets of newspaper. I could buy chicken at the house two doors down. It would somehow seem like justice to eat the cock that wakes me up early every day – not the sort of cock one wants in the morning – but I can’t face eating something I know even if only aurally. So I avoid the place.

Comments

[Tina]

Hm, I wanna come over to Cafayate and go food shopping with you! :-)

[ladym]

Tracy you write beautifully. Would love to read a novel if there was one..