On our arrival at the cottage we needed some supplies. “A farmers market will be held in three days time,” we had been told, but we needed supplies to last us till then. We went into town to a Tesco supermarket and bought supplies for three muesli and yoghurt breakfasts and two salad lunch times. Those supplies included 4 big red tomatoes. We came home from the supermarket and put our goodies into the refrigerator.
The next morning we opened the fridge and two of the tomatoes were rotten. Disgusted I put the tomatoes onto a plate and presented them silently to John.
“uh oh,” he said. “I guess that means we won’t be going to Tesco again?”
“Darn right we won’t be going to Tesco again!” I took the plate off him and slid the tomatoes into the bin. “We’ll wait for the farmers market.”
Market day arrived.
The market was held in a village and we had been told “Just follow the crowds”. So, with the village circled on a map, we set off. A thin brown line indicated a road that would lead us fairly directly to the village. Finding that thin brown road in a village proved a bigger challenge than we had expected. The first road, the one that appeared most logical led us straight in to a farmers barn. That was no good. The second road, led us into a farmers pig sty. A muddy seven point turn on a narrow lane and we were once again heading back to the centre of the village. In the village centre there was only one road left, but that looked even less likely than the pig sty or the barn roads. We pulled over and began contemplating heading back the way we had come and taking the long route into the big town around and down another main road. It seemed we should forget about trying to find the thin brown road.
As we sat chatting, a man walked out of the nearby church and starting loading things into his car boot. I grabbed the map and ran over to him. Waving the map in the air and then pointing at the village on it that we wanted to reach (I could not pronounce the name of the village) I then pointed at the final dirt track that we had not tried and said “this way?”
Through his body language and gesticulations I thought I understood what he was saying. I ran back to John waiting patiently in the car and said, “The man that ‘yes you can go to the village that way, but the road is very bad and you must drive slowly.”
“He spoke English?” John asked.
“No, body language.”
“He spoke body language?”
“Mm hmm.”
So we set off. I began to stress to myself quietly as to whether the boot man had understood what I was asking at all, and whether I had understood what his response was. But I thought it best not to mention my doubts to John just yet.
The meagre patchy potholed bitumen surface began to crumble, then disappeared into larger potholes that had my heart racing as I hung on to the roof of the car, requesting that John slow it down even further.
“Oh dear!”
“Are you sure this is the way to the farmers market?” John asked fifteen minutes later. I had my teeth so tightly clamped in fear that I could not respond. Just as well. Two minutes later cars came into view. There were cars parked all along the side of the road we were approaching on. There were car parked in fields as far as we could see. We had arrived at the farmers market. We had found the short cut, we had found the thin brown line.
“Phew!”
People carrying calico shopping bags, hessian shopping bags, plastic bags or pushing trolleys streamed in to the market from every direction.
Under the shade of trees on the corner of an intersection, wooden huts stood, erected permanently for the stalls. A musician sat on podium near the entrance playing Hungarian music on his guitar. A red faced, sweating, rotund lady busily stirred some delicious smelling soup or goulash in a big pot over an open fire in a permanent outdoor kitchen.
Stallholders sold, vegetables, fruit, bread, cakes, fresh sheep and goats cheese, yoghurt, wine, pickles, hand cured meats, ham, bacons and salami. You could request a bottle of apple juice and watch the apples being chopped and pressed into juice. Another musician at the far end of the market kept the ambience alive next to an archer dressed in traditional costume who sold shoppers a few shots at the target with a long bow and arrows.
A market cafe was set up every week for the market to provide hot teas and coffees. Several hot food stalls fed the hungry shoppers who had come from miles around.
A mushroom inspector was there to inspect mushrooms that shoppers brought to the market for identification as to whether they were edible varieties or poisonous.
I loved it.
Comments