4) St Lucia Above the Bay Castries food-market (or Kastwi manjé lapels in Kwéyòl)

Reasons To Be Cheerful Part 4

Castries food-market (or Kastwi manjé lapels in Kwéyòl)

The world-renowned Castries food-market, located in the centre of the city. It was ranked third “Best Food Market in the World” by National Geographic Magazine in 2022. Which is a huge achievement and something to be proud of and celebrated for and by the people of St Lucia.
Top Tip: Absolutely Visit The Castries Food Market.

I adore markets. Be they food, clothing, or bric-a-bac. Markets are my guilty pleasure. I especially love the Castries food market. 
Wondering in Castries market through the endless rows of tables and stalls, one is astounded at the variety, wonderful colour, and smells, from the incredible assortment of beautiful fresh local produce that’s available- an absolute treat for the senses. 
Like all the best markets it is a mirror image of its place, and the people it serves. It’s exotic, vibrant, loud, honest, slightly haphazard, thrifty, hot and charming – it’s not fake or contrived. It just wouldn’t work if it pretended to be something it wasn’t. 
It’s authentically St Lucian, simultaneously full of honourable character, humility and pride. 
This is the real-deal in genuine markets. How many times in Europe and America have you come across the “Ye old farmers market.” And ones heart sinks. I rest my case.
Proper Market Trading. Food & Clothing 

This vibrant, dynamic, tropical, colourful market is fabulous for locally grown fruit, vegetables, herbs, and spices. Medicinal ingredients for remedies are also to be found, sold by market traders who are both knowledgeable and charming. They intimately know the properties and benefits of the herbs, and potions they sell. And being St Lucian they will make and take the time to tell you! 
The Spice Man

The market is presently being refurbished. Phase one completed 2020 or 2021 depending on who one talks to. In an attempt to gauge the success of the refurbishment I spoke to a few traders. Each one had a different stance from hating it, to liking it. What was common, as in life, the consensus is “It was much more fun back-in-the-day”
A Future Market Trader

Saturday Main Market Day
The market traders are mostly good-natured women, multitasking with trading and child-caring duties. These heroic women sit in the shade, normally in bright multi-coloured clothing. Some of the women favour the national costume Madras-print. Normally a version of woven red and yellow tartan yarn. 
The women sit on a collection of seats from beer-crates, to broken ex-office swivel chairs. They habitually fan themselves for relief from the intense heat; simultaneously, blowing air out of their mouths and up to their nose. They also have an unusual habit of making a strange sound with their throats, while banging an ear with the palm of their hand!

Shout Out! 
The adjacent craft market is a wonderful experience too. Wares, artworks, clothing, pottery, is lovingly handmade by locals are for sale. There is the apologetically looking, generic tourist ‘tat’ for sale too. But each to their own!

Special mention to the jewellery stall in Castries Market. The proprietor Anthony makes and sells the most charming, authentic, hand-made Gemstone St Lucian Jewellery. A true reflection of this island – small, intricate, and really beautiful; his work is an exquisite art-form, which is beautifully and completely of its place. 
Top Tip: Visit Anthony For Genuine St Lucian Jewellery In Castries Market.

At Castries market all things are possible, and all things ‘food’ are for sale. You can shake hands with the person that grew the salad, fruit and vegetables, that’s going to arrive on your family plates. You can also! But I wouldn’t shake hands with the butcher or the fishmonger.
The butcher will do anything with meat, and wastes nothing from the carcases. All the hues of red, pale pink, and fatty white coloured meats are all exposed and ready to be thrown onto the scales to be sold. 
Street Meat 

As you walk into the market there’s an almost palpable and visible yellow whiff of fish broth, Cow heel soup, and airborne stale vegetable cooking-oil. That said there is great Kweyol Street-food available, a hearty combination of workers lunches, and tourist snacks. What they have for sale is what they make, grow, and transport to market on that day. There are no burger-chain joints here!  

It’s hot, real hot! There’s scarcely a breeze, and little fresh air in the covered areas. There is the occasional welcome gust of make-up air, which blows into the back of the market off the harbour which hits you like a welcome cool face-flannel. This is a cauldron where your body will have to adjust if you are going to survive in the heat and humidity. 

Top Tip. The market is mostly covered with a metal roof, which sounds amazing in the rain, but gets extraordinarily hot and stuffy. So, take fluids with you.   
Market Thoroughfare

There’s always loud music playing in St Lucia, competing for attention whenever a crowd is gathered. 
I hear the strains of the classic Country & Western ballad “Don’t take your hands off my heart” – A St Lucian favourite. So much so, it could be the national anthem. Some of the women on the stalls, belt out this tune with gusto and feeling, clasping their hands to their bosoms in a heartfelt and earnest fashion. 
I see a woman stall-holder, from one of my favourite stalls waltzing on her own, her arms were shaped as if clasping an imaginary partner. She is high on life, beautifully singing and dancing without a care in the world.  

On her stall she sells an assortment of clear bottles which are filled with twigs, grass and what looks like an assorted mass of rotting vegetation. Customers are told just add spiced rum, for what the market traders call St Lucian Viagra
Lucian Viagra (allegedly!?) 

You’ve got to love these market women. The gossip, banter, and humour, they deliver sitting knees apart on a beer-crate makes fascinating watching and listening. 
They spend most of the working day talking to each other in French- Kwéyòl and English, moving between the two with the synchronicity of an automatic gearbox, depending how sassy, scurrilous or slanderous the conversation is going to get. They call it “Ro-Ro.” Lucians love a Ro-Ro.

The market conversations are always lively and loud, wafting over the ambient noise which could be anything from abrasive Country & Western music, an animated vigorous tete-a-tetes between traders and customers. Or the slate slamming down from a lively game of Dominos. 
The language of the market is very physical. There are lots of hand and arm movements, gestures and signals which count for a lot, its generally loud, but good humoured and friendly. St Lucians love a friendly dialectic. 
Street Food. Everybody Sits Together & Eats Together

These laudable women seem to sit there all day, in the searing heat, surviving on a diet of, boiling hot Cow-heel soup, Souse, cool coconut water, and gossip. (Cow-hill soup is what it says it is. Souse is a spicy soup which the main ingredient is lumps of glutinous and gelatinous pig fat/trotters.) 
Cow heel soup and Souse, is the last supper that St Lucians in England, struck down with unspeakable European diseases, or the cold, dream about when being served with their last rights. 
Top Tip: In any market in the world. I normally wait and let a local buy from the stall first. That way you get a good guide of the price you should expect to pay.

I watched spellbound as a woman approached a fruit & veg barrow. The women seemed to know each other. The shopper was already laid down with two heavy bags of goodies.
It seems the customers have their own traders who they are loyal to. They greeted each other as long-lost friends. “Eh! Eh! It’s you Mistress Helen? “Sa-ka-fèt-Tifi?” (Which means how are you lady?) “Mwen las tifi! Mwen las!” (I’m very tired lady) came the repeated reply.
Through the tale of her exhaustion, they both laughed out loud and started to put the world to rights. There’s always time for a long chat in St Lucia. Even while other customers are waiting to be served. It’s an abject lesson in humility, pointing the way to how a better life can be had by us all? 
Top Tip: Unlike Europe or America. In St Lucia the customer is not always right. So before picking up any food stuff for inspection, please ask the stall holder first! 
Produce From The Garden Of Eden

I approached the same barrow to buy some lettuce, tomatoes and cucumber. (Or “Coo-cuum-ba” as locals call it. Konkonm in local parlance) The lady trader smiled at me politely, revealing a row of beautifully straight white teeth, with a small gap in the centre, which she had installed a gold bridge. 
Even though I was interrupting her flow on another juicy bit of gossip from her colleague on the next stall. I was greeted with a lovely polite smile, which was genuine, and warming as St Lucian rum.   
“Yes!” What can I do for you Sir?” I liked the formality. This transaction could pass off painlessly, I thought to myself.
She continued to smile at me as if I had saved her from the grasp of Purgatory, as she tried to sell me the entire contents of her stall. She tried to get me to buy some Plantain bananas. I replied I had bananas growing at my house. She looked me up and down, and replied in an offended vexatious tone that she’d picked these bananas in the dark that morning from her own garden, and they were better than anything I could have grown. That told me! 
My Fallen Banana Tree (Farmer Williams Must Do Better)

As we were completing our business. The woman on the stall next-door, whose flow of gossip I had interrupted earlier, tried to entice me over with a wave of a large stubby cucumber. (I don’t think so!) I apologised to her, explaining I was going to continue with the vendor I was with. She gave me an icy look, and made a chilling hissing sound by “sucking her teeth,” that really was the ‘freezing’ side of discourtesy, if not a little intimidating. However the thaw was broken as to two women laughed at my discomfort. 
Top Tip: If one’s not used to doing so. Do not ‘suck your teeth’ in public!

Super Sexy Grill & Bar.

I was having a great day filled of the joys of bonhomie and wonderful social interaction, joshing with my market trader ladies, the fish guy was a real hoot too.  
At the market, I stopped for “one for the road.” A swift Piton beer at the Super Sexy Grill & Bar.  Apart from the beaded curtains, and the tinsel decorations, which I loved, and added a touch of allure and glamor! I found very little ‘supper sexy’ there, but the staff were friendly and the beer was cold. The clincher was, they were playing the majestic Gregory Isaacs “Night Nurse.” Nothing could spoil my mood!

I spoke too soon. The annoying country and western music kicked back in, and this time extra loud too. Shattering the mirror that all is well with the world, time to go. 
I left my cool Piton I was really enjoying, and had a swift beer nearer home at the Rodney Bay Marina. 
View From The Marina

Arriving home, I went straight to the balcony to capture the remains of the day, and to prepare my supper, of beautiful Tuna , seasoned with the local herbs, and a side salad I had brought in the market earlier that day.
Pure and simple – beautiful food. My type of cooking, where all the work has been done and prepared already by nature. And all that remains to be done is to heat it, and plate it up. 

Waiting for the grill to get to temperature, with the guitar on my lap. I accompany Miles Davis on the jazz classic “So What.” To the backdrop of another beautiful sunset.
I tucked into my delicious fish supper. The salad tasted the way lettuce and tomatoes used to taste. Sweet ‘n’ sharp, fragrant and heartbreakingly beautiful and delicious, like a sweet gratifying childhood memory, of long hot summer holidays. I remember my lovely market ladies too, and I laugh out loud!
Cooking With Mother Nature

Acknowledgments:

• Kwéyòl Dictionary Ministry of Education Government of St Lucia 2001 
• Lorraine Mulcahy for her love understanding!

End of Reasons to be Cheerful Part Four.  

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