Tauragė Vegetable Market

“I think you should drive,” Arūnas said.

“No, no – I’ll walk. It’s just around the corner,” I replied. The weather was sweltering and I had just stepped out of my non-air-conditioned, sauna of a car – I had no desire to get back in. Besides, the market really was just around the corner. I was still on the phone to Arūnas when I got there. It was a four-minute march, tops.

I made my way around the market, fascinated by the quality, freshness and, best of all, price of the vegetables on offer. Most sellers had a similar range of homegrown (and most probably organic) veggies – tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, potatoes, beetroot and a selection of berries, mostly blueberries, redcurrants and gooseberries. The sellers were extremely proud of and enthusiastic about their produce. You could smell the freshness – it was wonderful.

Our own greenhouse is not doing great this year, so while we have lots of cucumbers, we have very few tomatoes or peppers yet. My eyes fell on a beautiful bowl of “pink” tomatoes – my favourite kind. They were perfectly ripe and just calling to be eaten. I bought the full bowl without a thought. Then I spotted bunches of beetroots with the leaves still attached. The leaves were firm and green – they had obviously been dug very recently. I took both bunches, plus a large bunch of sage that the grower was practically giving away.

I now had three bags on my arm, but I’m in pretty good shape and reckoned I could carry lots more. Before I knew it, I had bought another two kilos of tomatoes and one and a half kilos of gooseberries, forgetting that I still needed to buy potatoes. I had seen potatoes near the entrance that I wanted to buy – they were the perfect size for salads – so I made my way back there and bought five kilos. The seller also had freshly dug beetroot, and feeling the two bunches I had bought already wouldn’t last long, I bought another five kilos.

For those of you keeping up with the maths, I now had over eighteen kilos of vegetables. I’ll be grand, I thought to myself as I headed back to the car, a satisfied smile on my face.

When I hit the street, I realised how much those umbrellas and awnings in the market had been protecting me from the heat. It was BOILING and I now had eighteen kilos of bulky vegetables to cart back to the car. Four-minute march, my eye! I made it across the road before having to take a short break. I made it to the rear of the next building before taking a second break. You see how this is going. Ten minutes later, red-faced and panting, with dig-marks from plastic bags all up my arms, I was fit to collapse. I pushed on, determined to get back to the car and rid myself of these damn vegetables. What had I been thinking?!

I guess the story has a happy ending. I did make it back to the car to deposit my veggies. I then went and stood in the doorway of the nearest supermarket, where the air-conditioning was pumping down. When I finally cooled down, I went to meet Arūnas for lunch.

“I told you to drive,” he said when I recounted my tale.

Groan.

(Needless to say, I can barely move today. I am, however, very happy with my purchases!)

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