Keep it Simple: The joys of the teeny-tiny mini mercado
The thing I love most about travel is the vast wealth of mostly useless information and knowledge I come packing home with me after every trip. The whirling dervishes, trance-inducing dancing my daughter and I saw performed in Istanbul was a mesmerizing wonder, yet nothing which might ever help in my gardening practices or atricky home repair project.
While closer to home, the Saugatuck chain ferry that spans the Kalamazoo River is an eccentric engineering marvel, though it will never help me figure out why my rototiller won’t start. But while those, and many other travel quests may have enriched my imagination with wonderfully useless information and wonders, they mostly just take up space in my head; albeit enjoyable space, providing memories, as they say, to last a lifetime.
While other folks may queue in long lines to visit dusty old forts, castles, museums or an amusement park ride to get their useless memory fix, my wife and I happily wander the aisles of grocery stores, big and small, shiny and bright, dusty and cramped, throughout the world, and in turn learn a little bit about the everyday lives of the people who live there.
These super or mini mercados (depending on their size), as they are known throughout Portugal and where we had rented a small apartment in the seaside town of Lagos, were everywhere and ripe for theexploring to enrich my mind with yet more useless stuff.
My wife found a package of chocolate-covered digestives (ie: biscuits (ie: cookies)) to purchase and I fell in love with the juxtaposition of bland digestive/biscuit/cookie taste, overwhelmed by pure European milk chocolate. We never know what we will stumble upon as we cruise the beverage aisle hoping to find a unique beer rather than the Portuguese national brands of Sagres or Superbock most folks favor.
In a cramped mini mercado tucked away near the Owl Story English Bookshop and Beer & Co., my wife discovered a biscuit-type raisin cookie she couldn’t live without, and the Pingo Doce Supermercado, on the other side of the river, stocked packages of the dry toast ends we favored when smeared with hummus.
Fortunately, Lagos was awash in mini mercados, more so than most American towns brimming with convenience stores where folks drive up for a terrible styrofoam cup of coffee, a six pack of beer, a pack of smokes, or lottery ticket. That said, anytime we came upon a new teeny-tiny store, we had no choice but to investigate and it was on our first full day in Lagos that we hit the mini mercado jackpot on our way back from one of the many cliffside beaches which ring themselves around the city on its ocean side.
On our way out, I noticed a basket of dense, round loaves of bread on the counter, and on a whim, picked one up, hefted it in my hands and purchased with a small handful of euros tucked away in the pockets of my shorts. Outside, I tore off a small chunk; not having a clue as to what it was I had just bought — sweet or savory? I knew not which but one small nibble told me I was in the land of the enjoyable unknown. A subtle licorice/fennel taste gave way to a sublime sweetness and I was hooked.
Back at the apartment, I sliced down the middle of the loaf intending to have a slice for lunch when surprise number two insinuated itself inside the part of my brain I reserved for useless facts and information. Crunch, crunch went the knife as it bit into something somewhat hard.
Upon separating the bread, I discovered two halves of a fully cooked egg in its shell inside the center of the loaf. Strange, I told my wife who immediately went to her phone and discovered near Easter the Portuguese make a sweet fennel bread with an egg baked in the center to represent the rebirth and rising of Christ from the dead. Imagine that! And such tasty bread as well.
Thank goodness for the vast wealth of useless information we seek out and keep tucked away with us as memories; much like the egg hidden inside Portugal’s delicious fennelly sweet Easter bread, which I was fortunate enough to stumble upon one fine morning at yet another nondescript grocery store while out and about in the big, wide world.
— Michael Jones is a columnist and contributor for the Gaylord Herald Times. He can be reached at mfomike2@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Keep it Simple: The joys of the teeny-tiny mini mercado
