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My Sunday Morning At The Market
Hey guys 🙂
Do you like visiting markets?… Yes??? Great, you’ll like this post 🙂 …No??? Well, you’ll still like this post because I got something new to you 😉
Me, I have always enjoyed visiting markets of all sorts be it in India or abroad..above all, on Sundays! I just love window shopping and finding out how people go about their business. Markets are really colourful places whether you’re there for purchasing something or just looking around. Flea markets, specialized markets or any kind of market, there’s so much to learn at these places besides checking out the stuff on sale. You get to know about the different products on sale, develop bargaining skills, find out how vendors conduct their trade and dealings, how they try to attract and retain customers or fleece gullible customers, etc, etc…
I specially love visiting wholesale markets. Here you can find stuff from all over the country at a cheap price.
Today, I’m going to share with you some of my photos taken on a Sunday morning last month at a wholesale fruit market on the outskirts of Mumbai – The APMC Market of Vashi (or Navi Mumbai), one of the largest in India and said to be the biggest in Asia for wholesale agricultural produce.
On Sundays, the wholesale markets (the Fruit & Vegetable Market and the Grain Market) are closed. But a few shops were open for me to take photos of some good-looking fruits… and buy them surprisingly cheap!
So here we go…
First, the king of fruits and national fruit of India… Mango! Well, mangoes originated in India. Here’s a crate of “the king of mangoes,” the internationally reputed Alphonso mangoes!
Alphonso mango (also known as Hapoos) is an important export product. One of the most expensive kind, it is considered as one of the best in terms of sweetness, richness and flavour. The finest fruit comes from a narrow strip of about 20 km from the seashore along the Konkan coast. These fruits are very expensive in the early season from Feb-end to early-March. Its cost comes down by the end of the season in May when the monsoon sets in the Konkan region.
The Devgad Alphonso is amongst the most expensive sub-breeds of Alphonso. The above crate of 3 dozen medium size Alphonso mangoes from the beginning of the season from Devgad was for 1500 rupees (the pre-bargaining price was 2000 rupees)but would have normally been somewhere around 2500-3000 rupees at the fruit sellers’. There were just these two crates of mangoes that day.
This box of eight kilos of grapes was for 350 rupees! The average retail price at that time was 100 rupees per kilo.
Check out these luscious tangerines…
Green bananas…
Workers packing pomegranates into boxes…
Lemons…
Pineapples…
Melons…
These were at 10 rupees each whereas the retail fruit vendor sells it for 20 rupees each.
And, Watermelons…
Imagine buying two large dark green ones for 100 rupees! Anywhere else, the same would cost 200 rupees.
After the fruit market, the next stop was the fish market. It was small compared to the one in my locality but some of the fish sold here looked like it had been freshly caught. Now I’m quite adept at recognizing whether a fish is fresh or not with an experience of about 15 years.
This is (Red Snapper)…
The gills are rich red which means the fish is fresh…
(Silver Pomfret)…
(Black Pomfret)…
The dark silver fish to the extreme left is (King Fish or Seer Fish). One fish away to its right is the (Chinese Pomfret)…
(Indian Salmon)…
(Indian Silver Bar Fish) is at the bottom and small (Crocker) in the middle…
(Bombay duck) to the top extreme right…
This (mackerel) is for you! A guy has just told her that this photo is going to appear in a popular daily, hahaha
(prawns)…
Octopus… Fancy buying one? 😉
Baby (lobsters)…
(clams)…
(oysters) and small size (crabs)…
A large (crab)…
Next to the fish market there was a small vegetable market. Check out the colourful photos…
Garlic all the way from the South Indian hill station of Ooty…
Look what I found! Garlic pods from Kashmir… very hot and spicy!
It’s to be eaten raw in the morning followed by a glass of water….a cure for all kinds of ailments! I took a tiny bite and literally burned my tongue! Highly potent considering its size 🙂
The last stop was at a nearby mutton shop where I found this cute looking blue-eyed lamb…
Since it was the only lamb around and was kept away from the other goats to be slaughtered that day I had thought it was going to be killed after a few months. But no, I was wrong! The cute little lamb was going to be somebody’s meal that very day. The following week when I went to the mutton shop there was another lamb around.
See, you discover all sorts of surprising things when you are visiting marketplaces. Well, that’s the end of this post, guys! I hope that this post has been interesting for you.
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See you soon…till then, take care 🙂
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