La Fería

Between the buses that careen around the city, the children, the street dogs, and everything else that happens in cities these days, Santiago is a place full of noise - probably not the bustle of New York or Boston, but it's by no means a quiet place, and, on Saturday and Sunday, the city gets louder (and probably a bit bigger) when huge open-air markets sprout up in plazas or commandeer entire roads. This is not your dirt-cheap-t-shirts-brand-name-knock-offs-kitschy-snow-globe-filled tourist trap, but a veritable supermarket spilled out into the street. Micheal Pollen's most vivid wet dreams have nothing on this collection of fresh, local, dirt cheap veggies and fruit. There are, of course, the odd stalls selling baby toys or women's underwear, and the vendors on the outskirts who have strange assortments of simple-but-lovely hand-made jewelry, books (the Kama Sutra sidling up to motivational books that have made friends with their neighbor, Pablo Neruda), and garage-sale-worthy knick-knacks. These ferías have become neighborhood institutions, and I've heard people argue the merits of one over the other, but wherever you are in Santiago, it seems like the entire community makes it out over the weekend to buy a week's worth of colorful, mouth-watering produce that ranges from avocados and peaches to giant orange-green vegetables and vibrantly violet beans I have never seen before. However, the strangest part has to be the fish stalls that are usually nestled in the center of the fería and are impossible to miss, if only because you can smell them from a block away. The variety of seafood isn't anything like what's on offer in the side-corridors of Mercado Central, where you can buy sea-urchins to compliment your squid (beak included) and meter-long eels, the sight of these fishmongers selling off yesterday's large, slippery catch to the small crowd packed around the small booths is itself a reason to rush to your closest fería this weekend. While in the US, those who can afford it are trying to buy local and fresh and are finding it hard to keep track of the carbon footprint on those organic apples that were actually imported from a South American mega-orchard (probably via China, like everything else these days), Santiagüinos have got it figured out: buy food for a couple of days at a time, buy a little meat from the butcher around the corner, and stock up on Saturday with a week's worth of local, in-season produce.