This market is definitely something to experience. Don’t forget to hone your bargaining skills and expect to haggle. It’s totally expected of you, the buyer. Of course, you can choose to ignore this advice and pay the asking price but the experience is bland and hardly adventurous. Bear in mind, it’s not cool to haggle over food prices because they remain fairly competitive. Feel free to haggle over the prices of other merchandise such as clothing, footwear, shawls, carpets, jewellry and so on.
There is absolutely no end to the merchandise available at this market. Here is another sampling of what you can buy. The goods are diverse and you can expect to see anything and everything.
Take your time and when you get hungry, there’s ample food to tickle your palate with. Feast your eyes on these scrumptious goa sausages (chorizos) which are not exactly like the spanish chorizo but similar.
There are cafes you can hide in if the heat gets to you – they’re usually air-conditioned. Cafe SF Xavier is my favorite because you can not only eat there but browse around the cafe market for curios and gifts to buy your friends back home. Authentic goan artefacts, books and sweets. The kind of sweets your granny made for Christmas. Dodol, Batco, pinag and all those yummies.
Photos: complements of my flickr friends Fred Noronha and Christina Pinto.
Del Lobo 