Market shopping St Lucian style
Seaduced
John & Jane Craven
Sat 18 Dec 2010 00:29
Today we headed of to Castries to have a look round and visit the local market which is reputed to be one of the best in the Caribbean. Castries is the main town in the north of St Lucia. The buildings are all very brightly coloured and have plenty of Caribbean style. The market itself is half under cover in several large buildings and half outside. There is a large area for fish - I was stopped and asked if I was interested by one guy but it turned out that all he had to sell was mahi-mahi - I think we have had enough of that for now and I still have a load in the freezer! I tried to offload some to Lance and Doug who were self catering with their family but they politely declined saying they would rather eat out!!
Walking past the fish area, John and I had a bit of a double take when we saw huge steaks being cut of a large, very dark red piece of what we assumed was 'meat', it turned out it was dolphin. Lance and crowd had seen this earlier in the day and asked about it, they had also seen what was left of the dolphin so there was unfortunately no mistake - I think we will be giving that a miss. The market is a daily event and as there is no refrigeration you just have to hope that the food is freshly caught/killed that day. There was a huge choice of vegetables, some we recognised and some unusual ones - I bought a local charity cookbook when we arrived so I think some studying might be in order.
Predictably, there were tons of fresh herbs and spices to be bought - these islands aren't known as the spice islands for nothing, there were enormous cinnamon sticks, larger than I have ever seen. John being a glutton for punishment bought a bottle of homemade local hot sauce, we have a bottle of supermarket stuff but this homemade one makes the portuguese prir-piri almost seem tame. Also we bought some local spiced rum - the bottle is full of spices and when the rum runs out, you simply top the bottle up. They also have banana ketchup here, the taxi driver was telling us that it is very tasty and the ideal thing to accompany your chicken and fries as you use it just like tomato ketchup - all seems a bit odd to me!
As I am writing this I am waiting for the rain to stop - we have had some interesting weather since we arrived, until yesterday it was hot and sunny every day, but now we seem to be getting lots of rain, and not exactly short sharp showers either - we were planning a trip to the beach this afternoon, but I am less than convinced.....
Unfortunately, all the shops close half a day on Saturday, so we are going to go back on another day to see the rest of the town. There are two large duty free malls which are worth a look as well as all the local shops which all seem to sell everything!