Рынок - The Market

Anastasia and I went pumpkin hunting today. They don't sell pumpkins in the grocery stores here like they would back home in October. For pumpkins, you must go to the market. The market consists of rows and rows of stalls (rusty metal boxes turned on their sides) lining a dirt, or concrete street, in which muddy water stands, and from which people sell their vegetables and fruits, pickles, cabbage salads (out of buckets), socks, coats, DVDs, pig heads or anything else that you might be looking for. We got the directions to the market from our Russian teacher, who lives in this part of town that we had never been to. This smells of adventure.

We hopped on our Marshrutka bus, carefully counting out the allotted 10 stops to Ploshad Sovietskaya, between struggling to stay standing upright despite the jolting and sudden stops with worn out, squeaking breaks, and trying to talk quietly enough so as not to turn heads. After locating the market, we wandered throughout, keeping our eyes peeled for pumpkins, and soon had the located the whole two in the entire marketplace. At two different stalls. My transaction went smoothly and I got a nice sized boogar for 50 roubles, or approximately a dollar and a half. We went back to the stall where we had seen the other pumpkin earlier, and asked the old lady at the stall if we could buy it. She said a price and started talking about something. We were confused for a second, but then realized that she was giving us a recipe for how to make the pumpkin, how to peel and cook it, and what to serve it with. When we replied to her, she realized that we were not Russian, and asked us what language we spoke. “English” we said. She then asked us if we were from England. “Da,” we said. “Oh, I studied German in school,” she said. Very nice lady.

We also needed some red potatoes out of this trip, and found them at a stall on the way out. They were piled in buckets all around the front of the stall, freshly pulled out of the earth and covered in dirt. Anastasia walked up to the man selling them. “Can I have four?” she asked him. He then pulled out a plastic bag and proceeded to dump the bucket of potatoes into the bag. “Nyet, nyet, nyet!” says Nastya, “four potatoes.” “Oh,” says the man, laughing, “I thought you wanted four kilograms.” -“Are you Finnish?” He adds . . . “Da,” says Nastya.

We got four free potatoes out of the deal. “A present,” said he.