"Bazaar" Experiences in Batumi

Each time I have been in Georgia, I have wanted to visit a fruit and vegetable market. Earlier this week, on the way back from one of the farmer trainings, I asked at just the right moment, as we happened to be passing it, and we had a little time. It is a covered market in a huge open hall, with everything under the sun.

This is just the right season, as the produce is abundant and absolutely beautiful. So, we walk in, and the first thing you see is the stall of cheap Chinese plastic junk...with one bin of apples and pears. I suppose the junk is to keep the kids happy while Mom is shopping. I was a little concerned about what we would find when that was the first thing I saw!

No worries! The next thing was the stall of watermelons and Persian-type melons. I was lucky enough to be passing just as the proprietor cut a melon open to show to a customer. I wanted to eat it right then & there...it was so red and looked so good! I just can't eat enough watermelon here. The interesting thing about it is that for some reason, Mamuka cannot tell me why, watermelon is called "winter melon" in Georgian! It's high summer now and they are at their peak, so it does not make sense to me.

This is hazelnut harvest season, and they are for sale everywhere...raw, not dried or roasted. The Georgians call them "white" hazelnuts. This vendor has several different kinds...some are longer, looking more like an acorn, some round like what we are used to. He gave me several to taste, hoping for a sale, but I didn't think I could bring them home as they are not processed. So he looks a little disappointed.

Every small farmer in this area has a plot of hazelnut trees, just like they have plots of mandarins. Yesterday and today the trainers and the mandarin farmers were asking me about the "American white butterfly". It is a caterpillar attacking the hazelnuts, and other trees. I told them I didn't know what it was, but I would look it up. So I did my homework online and found out that it is called "fall webworm" in the US...it is a kind of tent caterpillar. The good news is that it does not attack citrus, and that it can be managed with B.t. Apparently in some places here, they are using what I call the "nuclear option" - spraying the heck out of it in hazelnut orchards. And are likely killing bees and natural enemies at the same time.

Mamuka (r) and tobacco sellers in Batumi vegetable "Bazaar"

I thought this was very interesting...I've never seen tobacco for sale like this before. Most Georgians smoke, and in the countryside, a lot of them roll their own cigarettes. So they sell tobacco like this in the market, alongside rolling papers. There are apparently different kinds (the dark pile and the light), and it is grown in Georgia. It is very heavy smoke, like Russian Sobranie cigarettes...the tobacco for those probably came from Georgia in the Soviet era. Interesting, but I could do without the clouds of smoke everywhere!

The market reminded me of the huge covered markets in Morocco and Tunisia. Beautiful vegetables and fruits as well as cheeses, sauces, pickles and a meat section and fish. The vegetables looked luscious, with the huge pinkish tomatoes, Armenian cucumbers, etc.

 

The processed foods fascinate me...they make all kinds of things at home here, not just jams and jellies, but wine, sauces for meat made from sour plums, a liqueur made from the fruit of Cherry laurel...it tastes like almonds because its a cherry & almond relative. The soda bottles to the left contain sauce or the liqueur., not sure which.  

And everyone in the countryside makes chacha, the vodka -like spirits made most often from grapes.  I don't think they were selling it in the market, but pretty much everything else. This week, I have had chacha made from honey and from pomegranates, as well as grapes. And I have been given several bottles of it. I'll share when I get home!

Georgians really like their chacha, and take any occasion to drink it, but I'm not one for spirits, especially for lunch! And not in the quantities they drink it! We were invited to a dinner by some of the trainers last night, and it would have been toasts all evening with chacha, but Mamuka's sister was there and neither she nor I wanted to drink that much chacha, so we toasted with wine. 22 times, I think, if I didn't lose count, which I may well have! It was wine made with Rkatseteli white grapes by one of our mandarin trainers, Afto. This one was more like a chardonnay than a lot of the Rkatseteli I've had. I've had various homemade wines as well as commercial wines, which remind me of our foothill Syrah and Barbera wines, with the same richness of flavor.

I found these pickles fascinating...When I showed interest, the seller just took out a knife, sliced off a piece and gave me a sample, hoping I would buy. There were not too many customers in the market mid-afternoon. and no one back in this section. The cucumber pickles were not quite dill, but a combination of herbs and spices. I liked the look of the stuffed tomatoes on the left, and the pickled garlic on the right. From experience, I know the beets are delicious!

Today, Saturday, is the first day we've had off since I've been here, and it was a real pleasure. The Minister of Agriculture invited Mamuka and me to lunch at a seaside restaurant called San Remo (!), which, as always, involved multiple dishes of meat and fish...as well as multiple toasts, only with a nice red wine this time, not chacha.

My other "bazaar" experience...
After lunch today, I asked Mamuka to take me to the goldsmiths' "bazaar". That seems to be  the name for any market. I was unaware it existed until I asked Mamuka to find us hand lenses for our training last week, and he had had no luck finding them anywhere. Finally I suggested he talk to jewelers or gold/silversmiths, so he went there and bought up all the hand lenses they had for sale - 5 , I think.

I was curious to see what it was like, thinking it would be tiny shops individual shops in little old streets like in Istanbul or Cairo. He pulled up to a huge, multi-story modern building that looked more like a movie theater with posters all over it. It looked like a combination mall/exhibition hall. The bottom floor was given over to products from India, but up an escalator, there was a huge room with hundreds of people sitting right next to each other on benches behind glass display cases about 2.5 feet across. The cases were full of jewelry...all kinds, gold, silver, platinum, stones, costume jewelry, all jumbled in together.

At first, I didn't want to stay because there was just too much, I could not really take it in. Finally, I saw some earrings I liked and we asked to see them...and to look at them with the jeweler's loupe. I was ready to buy them, but Mamuka insisted that we look for other ones first. Good thing we did. We found similar ones for a lot less from a woman who looked like she needed the income. With the loupe, we could see the 585 stamped on the clasp, which means 14 carat gold, but Mamuka wanted to be sure they were real. So the vendor took us upstairs to the smiths, the experts. There were little tiny workshop/shops up there with guys making all kinds of gold jewelry. We went into a shop and the goldsmith rubbed the back of the earring catch on this black stone until it left a little path of gold. Then he took a tiny pen-like instrument with a gold tip out of a drawer and rubbed another line next to the two from my earrings, and looked at it carefully with his loupe. Then he dropped some kind of solution on all of the lines, blotted it, and then looked at it again. He told us the gold was actually only 583...not quite 14 carat, but it next to it. Close enough for me. That whole process cost a whopping $2. So I bought the earrings...after a tiff with Mamuka...Georgians want to pay for everything, even my souvenirs! I told Mamuka to go away and just talked to the woman, so she took my money. It was some experience, and I have some lovely pink gold Georgian earrings to show for it!

Maybe I'll have more "bazaar" experiences in Tbilisi, as we are heading back tomorrow. More later.

Cindy