Dappermarkt

For most of the time we've been here, Katie and I have been going to Dappermarkt on Saturday morning to do our weekly shopping. It's much cheaper than the grocery store, more fun, and people will let you practice your Dutch with them.

The market is conveniently marked with these streamers, making it easy to find.

Flowers, flowers, flowers! For the last few weeks, there has been a booth selling 20 roses for 2 euros, and other amazing deals. This is one of the "expensive" flower booths.

Of course, you have to have a nut stand. Here, you can also buy dried fruits and some grains.

This is the bread shop. While it looks rather temporary, they have their own ovens there and you can buy bread still hot. They make excellent brown bread that looks so healthy with greens and tomatoes. Here, you can see the difference in the front row. The loaves on the right are what we would call "whole grain" and the loaves on the left are the delicious amazing bread. It even has little seeds in it. Yum!

In case you were wondering where you could buy men's underwear in many colors... Dappermarkt is the place!

Here is Katie, on our adventure to culturally integrate more completely... by eating raw herring from a street vendor.

Yum... the sushi of the Dutch. Actually, it's nowhere near as frightening as you would think. Even the bits of raw onion are tasty. Perhaps not the best food before a date though...

The fabric vendors at the market are amazing! You can buy beautiful fabric for 2-6 euros/meter... and to give you an idea how cheap that is, the cheapest pretty fabric at a proper store costs about 10-12 euros/meter.

Of course, it's important to have a selection of several hundred watches.

Mhhh... this is where we buy most of our fruit & veg. Notice... one euro for a bag of bean spouts, or a bag of carrots, or a bag of peppers. On the right you see hunks of pumpkin. They also have yummy fruit for cheap. It's great!

If you wanted to buy nuts in a prettier setting, you could go down to the other end of the market. This guy also has a wider selection of dried fruits. On the right you can see fresh mint, for making mint tea. This stand is attached to one with an amazing selection of olives and other Mediterranean fare.
The view of the market... it was a beautiful day!
Ah, and of course, life would not be complete without hot peppers straight from the bush. In this case, the 1.80 you pay gets you the whole bush. What could be better?

Then, after all of our other shopping is finished, we stop by the cheese shop. It is an *amazing* place. The man and woman who run the place are super sweet, and they give you a little taste of all of the cheeses you are interested in before you buy them. They also have a great selection, and they know everything about cheese. We even found a blue cheese that both Katie and I enjoy... As a consequence of this shop, we eat far too much cheese.

Then, after buying cheese, it's time to celebrate with Turkish pizzas. It's basically a big pita with some kind of tomato/vegetable sauce on it, cooked in the oven. Then, when it's nice and toasty they add a creamy sauce, a chili sauce, tomatoes, and lettuce. Finally, it's rolled up, wrapped in foil, and if you take it "eet op" you can eat it right then.
(I'm not sure if that's a proper Dutch phrase or an adaptation by the Turkish guys who work there. It's funny going to a shop where you don't share fluency in a common language.)

Finally, on the way out you see this building that has writing on it in all sorts of different languages. Here, you can see (if you look closely) that it says "Perfectly happy in Dapperstraat." We think that maybe this used to be a bad neighborhood and this building was a government campaign, but again, this is a completely unsupported hypothesis. For Katie and I, at least, life on Saturday morning is perfectly happy on Dapperstraat.