Everything You Want and Nothing You Need: The Naschmarkt (Day 79)

The Entertainer
Naschmarkt

Everything has a price, and on Saturdays in Vienna you can negotiate for it in the language of your choice. The problem is that at the Naschmarkt, as Vienna’s largest flea market is called; everything is priced accordingly. It is best therefore to leave your English at home. This wasn’t shocking at first, this is after all Austria, what is odd is that upon arriving at the scene (and it is “the scene” on Saturday morning), is that for the better part of a kilometer in central Vienna, German was not the lingua franca.

He'll Make a Special Deal -- Just For You
Dealer - Naschmarkt

They’ll sell you anything here. Having encountered two American tourists on the U-bahn (talking in English no less) who were excited to make it to the market I expected to find the usual collection of bootlegged CDs and mass-produced t-shirts. So when I ascended the stairs from Kettenbrückengasse to find myself confronted with a display that can best be described as a disassembled sink (all parts for sale) I was pleasantly surprised. But beyond the trays of faucets, the full wealth of those ridiculously excessive byproducts of capitalism that Marx complained about was on display. Without looking too hard one could find American license plates, shoes, coins of dubious authenticity, books that included such titles as “Paris ist eine Hure” (no translation necessary), old soviet bills (Hungarian?), typewriters, LPs, violins, an odd portrait covered in some vaguely red paint, an minstrel show statue that looked like it was a plucked out of a display deriding “Entartete Kunst,” clothes of all sorts, cell phone chargers, and of course, a board game based around the imminent attack of vampiric cows, all of which were stored in ubiquitous blue and yellow “premium banana” containers.

The Typical Display
Naschmarkt

For the faint of heart and the other six days of the week, the upper half of the Naschmarkt (the Naschmarkt proper) is a vast expanse of fresh vegetables, olive-proffering hawkers, and gastronomic variety. Most of it remains a open air market filled with heavily accented cried of “Grüss Gott bitte schön” [Basically: Hello, buy something] but a few more permanent shops have been set up (most of which have names that can be formed with the formula culinary category + unit of land, bio-world, cheese-land, Asia house, etc.) between which there is enough variety to satisfy everyone. I’m pretty confident that despite the durian (Debacle? Success? Depends on whether you like fruit that tastes like a four course Indian meal) the Society of Exotic Fruits may be making a comeback soon.

Bigger and Better
Naschmarkt

The general rule however is, if you see something, don’t buy it, it is bound to be cheaper two stalls later. The only question then is: when will I get up the courage to cook an octopus?

German Food: Part One of Posibly More Than One (Day 10)

German Food:

More than this

Eine Lebenschmittelgeschäft (Grocery Store) in Alexanderplatz

To start this up, I just want to note that I've officially passed the equivalent of the McDonalds test of foreign language proficiency (McTFLP). In addition to no longer wondering whether I am capable of acquiring food for the next meal, I have had some modicum of confidence in my German abilities returned to me after successfully negotiating a cell-phone contract "auf Deutsch."

Given this new-found sense of self worth, and all of the culinary opportunities offered to me by having a reasonable expectation of being able acquire "vittles" on a regular basis, food has become something of a concern for me. This is especially true as I've found that each additional dollar (largely worthless and pronounced "euro" in Germany for some reason) I spend on food (the ephemeral "marginal euro") has a direct impact on my happiness unmatched by almost everything else in my life. I'm hungry, I buy a pretzel, bam, instant satisfaction. The extra euro I spend buying fresh vegetables instead of frozen has a similar effect. My advice is, and I'm willing to bet that the adult readers can corroborate this, if you are looking for a way to directly increase your happiness, spend a few extra dollars (or "euros") per day on food.

If all of this gives an impression that I'm living it large, let the discounted reality of the nearly broke city of Berlin disprove this illusion. As a college student I can tell you, the second part of to living the good life is knowing where to buy your extra food. Moreover, because Macalester's budgeting policy seems to factor in some additional spending on "beverages," the teetotallers among us (of which there is one) are free to splurge on a little extra fruit.

Current Standard for the good life: Being able to go into a grocery store and buy whatever I want without feeling guilty about it financially. A luxury that is never to be taken for granted.