Mercado San Blas
Tuesday, February 20
Because Cusco is a very beautiful city and the base for trips to Machu Picchu, Cusco is (rightfully) very popular with tourists from home and abroad. To escape the crowds, we avoided the restaurants and cafés near the main square and instead often went grocery shopping and had lunch at the local, somewhat hidden market.
The “Mercado San Blas” was located about a 15-minute walk from our apartment in Cusco on a very small side street. Unlike German markets, the markets in Cusco are not held outdoors, but rather in a building. The entrance to the Mercado San Blas is a very inconspicuous steel door. Once you find the door and enter the room, you're immediately in the middle of the tiny but bustling market.
In contrast to other markets in Cusco (e.g. “Mercado San Pedro”), the San Blas market is very small. Nevertheless, you can find everything you need here. Right at the entrance are the fruit and vegetable stalls. To the right there are the smoothie stalls where you can have freshly pressed fruit juices. In the back row are a few (restaurants like) stalls selling cooked food. To the left of the entrance are the stalls selling dried beans, quinoa, rice, and candy. The nice thing about shopping at the market is that fruit and vegetables sold there are usually perfectly ripe. If you’re buying avocados for example, a good vendor will immediately ask if you're buying them for today or tomorrow. Depending on your answer, the vendor will then select the perfect ripeness of the avocados.
We bought fresh fruit and vegetables here several times a week to take home, bought lunch at one of the food stalls, or had a freshly pressed fruit juice. To include as many vendors as possible, we shopped at a different fruit and vegetable stall each time. As for the fruit juices, we became friends with a vendor on our very first day at the market, and we kept coming back to her stall. When we had to say goodbye to her after three weeks in Cusco and ordered our last juice, it was really hard to say goodbye. Reason enough to return to Cusco someday!
