Mercado San Pedro ​Market

Monday, March 4

The easiest way to immerse yourself in everyday life in a Latin American city is to visit the local market and do your grocery shopping there.

In Cusco, Christoph and I often went to the “Mercado San Blas,” a small market just a few minutes from our apartment. This market was also lovely, but tiny. Whenever we had a little more time and needed to do more shopping, we visited the large “Mercado San Pedro” market on the other side of town. The market is located in a one-story building, where the market stalls are set up in order to what kind of produce is sold. Unlike in Germany, the market stalls are strictly arranged by category. There's a street in the market where all the bread vendors have their stalls, a street where the vegetable vendors are located, a street where every stall sells only cheese, and so on. Since the San Pedro market is very large, you could always find everything you were looking for, and at several stalls.

We were especially happy to have found the Cheese isle. By this time, we had already been in Latin America for six months, and as much as we loved it there, there was one thing we were missing: (aged) cheese. Every Latin American country we had visited so far, there was very good, fresh, (not aged) white cheese that had a similar consistency as feta. These “queso fresco” cheeses had a very mild flavor, as they were neither aged nor preserved in salt. Although we liked these cheeses, we missed the yellow cheese we have in Europe. When we discovered the cheese street in the market, we saw countless small yellow wheels of cheese lying there and immediately went to the first stall ans asked about the cheeses there. They only sold locally produced butter and cheeses. We were a bit taken aback by the salesperson’s use of the term “Parmesan” for the various cheeses. After a quick taste test, it was immediately clear to us that this name was absolutely wrong, but that the cheese sold there at least tasted like aged Gouda. This was more cheese flavor than we’d had in the past six months, so we were very happy with our purchase. We bought cheese here several times over the next weeks and were happy to have found Ines and her cheese stall in the market.