As those of you who have been regular readers over the last year may remember, while I was in Vancouver I made regular trips to the public market at Granville Island where I could find all manner of fresh fruit and veggies and a wide variety of fish and meat, not to mention the vast array of gourmet cheeses. Add to that the various herbs and grains etc and pretty much 95% of my ingredients could all be found in the often very busy market.
Well the morning market at Ukarumpa is kind of like that except there are only fruit and veggies, and not so many of them. The morning market happens 3 times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Calling it the morning market in my opinion is not the most appropriate name for it, I prefer to think of it as the pre-morning market. It kicks off at 6:30 and is all over by 8:00, and the later you go the more meager the selection is. On the 3 occasions that I have made it to the market so far I have arrived at around 7:00 and there has been quite a good variety of produce for sale. There are pineapple, bananas, strawberries, some other berry looking things, bell peppers (capsicums), potatoes, sweet potatoes, broccoli, beans, lettuce, vanilla beans, and the list could go on. The prices are often ridiculously cheap, yesterday I managed to score a bunch of bananas for around US $0.50 and they have been pretty tasty so far. Then there were the vanilla beans, 4 for US$0.30, not bad at all considering I spent around $9 for 2 of them in New Zealand last month. Instead of listing all of the items and their prices I will include a picture, everything in that picture was purchased for about US$3.00, not bad at all. On my first trip to the market I was looking for garlic, and was rather surprised when someone pointed it out at one of the tables. It was tiny, the whole bulb was about the size of a regular single clove. I bought some and used it a few times, I found it ridiculously painful to work with. Each clove was not much larger than a grain of rice once it was peeled. I ended up buying a jar of minced garlic from the store, much easier to work with.
Well enough about food for now, a number of people have expressed an interest in what my living arrangements are like. They are pretty nice. I have hot water available thanks to the solar panels on the roof, so I can still enjoy hot showers. The house is a duplex, with the other half of the house currently unoccupied. My half is the half on the right in the photo. Yesterday my flatmate arrived, his name is Ron I think. He is from Canada, Labrador I believe. His accent is quite different to the few Canadians I met in Vancouver, but I can normally understand him alright. He is a physio and is here for 6 weeks before heading to New Zealand for a couple of weeks. He is then going to Singapore or Taiwan, I forget, for a wedding, before eventually heading back to Canada for his own wedding in December. Any way back to the house, um, it has wooden floors, white walls and white ceilings. There is a kitchen with a rather scary gas oven, I am yet to figure out how to turn the oven on, some other gas ovens I have seen around Ukarumpa have to be started by using a long match. There is a starter button on the oven, but as yet pressing it has not achieved anything and the smell of gas filling the kitchen has prompted me to turn the gas off again before a random spark leaves me without any eyebrows. The lounge has a rather uncomfortable couch and 2 equally uncomfortable armchairs. There is also a table with 4 chairs. My bedroom has a double bed, a small desk with chair and an empty bookcase. If anyone has any further questions regarding the house feel free to leave a question, or if you prefer your questions to be private then send me an email.
A few people have also asked what the coffee situation is like here. Well, for the first few days it was particularly tough as I had no way of making any coffee. However someone I had lunch with on Saturday came to my rescue and found a spare french press that I can borrow for the time I am here. That alleviated the problem to some extent, now the only problem is I have no coffee grinder. I will have to keep a lookout for a cheap grinder somewhere, maybe the store will have one soon (it is pretty variable what the store actually has in stock). Anyway, I was given a bag of pre-ground coffee, PNG Blue Mountain. The beans taste kind of odd, I haven't quite been able to figure out exactly what it is that was odd about it that is odd, they are not really nasty tasting, just odd. Considering they were roasted in April I would have to say they are not too bad, and they may have actually been quite nice when they were fresh. There is a coffee research centre just outside of the village, I passed it on my way here from the airstrip, so I will have to pay a visit there some time.
There seems to be an abundance of very small wildlife around my house, particularly wildlife of the type that like to spin webs. I happened to look a little closer at one the other day and noticed that it had what looks like a big shell on it's back. I have since seen a few more of these around the exterior of the house, they look kind of cool so I took a photo.
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