Having lived in Cuenca and shopped at mercados weekly for the past two years, I wasn’t sure about wanting to take a tour of a Medellin mercado. However, we have loved most of the walking tours we have taken in various cities, and the reviews were good, so we decided to take the “Exotic Fruits Tour” from “Real City Tours.” I’m glad we did, and recommend the tour for anyone coming to this city.
The Minorista mercado itself was similar to Feria Libre in Cuenca. What made it different was our guide. She told us things about many of the fruits I had not known before. At numerous stops along the way she would pick out some samples, explain how to tell when the fruit is ripe, then cut them open and give us each a sample to taste. Several were fruits I had never tried before (lolu anyone?), and will now be making it to my weekly shopping list when I am home in Cuenca.
There was the normal assortment of fruits here, but as we had seen earlier with the wheelbarrow vendors, some were gigantic relative to what we are accustomed to. The avocado (right above) is more than twice the size of what I normally buy in Cuenca. We also saw massive watermelons and cantaloupes, though they were harder to photograph in any way that really showed their size.
Diana (our guide) had laminated cards for 20 of the fruits in the market. Each time she would stop to tell the history or use of a fruit, or to give us a sample, she would hold the card and the fruit, to allow us to make the connection to the name — both in Spanish and English.
As we finished the fruit section of the market, Diana had us sit down, where she gave us a summary of what we had seen and tasted. She then offered each of us our choice of juice drink. I opted for strawberry, and Diana suggested I have it mixed with milk instead of water. I had never tried it that way before, but I will now be experimenting to make it at home when we return — it was delicious!
As always, though the food is what you come to buy, the people are what we like to watch. As throughout Colombia, as foreigners we were welcomed everywhere we went, and most people would willingly pose for our cameras.
Beyond the fruit part of the mercado were sections where you could buy live animals (for pets or for food), and every kind of second hand item you could conceive of. One stall (upper center) had hundreds of roller skates and parts thereof, while another (lower right) had stacks of seemingly random circuit boards. A vendor (lower center) even had piles and piles of second hand plumbing connections.
One woman in our group commented that the local laundry had used too much heat in the dryer and shrunk her clothes. She headed off to the second hand clothing section to refresh her wardrobe, as the rest of us separated at the end of the tour.