It's another feria Friday!
Since Lavanson is a vegetarian, we buy lots of veggies each week at our local feria in Grecia. It's the only place in town where we can find such a wide selection of fruits and veggies all in one place.
It's also, the Friday meet up spot for the local expats.
If we could, we would love to buy all organic but unfortunately, there are only a couple of spots where we can find a tiny selection of organic veggies, and no organic fruits to speak of. Organic fruits (at least in our town) are almost non existent.
There are many delicious fruits that grow in Costa Rica. Most of which we had never heard of. By way of a friend, we discovered a vendor at the feria where we can buy white Costa Rican pineapples -Yum - (they are sweeter than the traditional pineapples). The stall isn't designated as "organic" but he uses no pesticides on the white pineapples.
There are a few of these kinds of vendors at the feria but you pretty much have to know that they use no pesticides because there will be no designation as such. Word is that, some of these vendors who use no pesticides, cannot advertise as organic because it's rather expensive to be "certified organic" in Costa Rica.
white pineapple vendor
Friday feria hours are noon - 9pm and on Sat 9am - noon.
Most of the expats shop on Friday and arrive by about 1:00pm. You can usually find them gathered together in the middle of the feria where there are several small "sodas" ( Costa Ricans call their small restaurants sodas). The food is pretty good and it's a great place to catch up on the latest gossip.
There are also several panaderías (bakeries). I met up with my friend Ed for a pastry and cup of coffee.
Costa Rica has excellent coffee! Some of the best in the world. The coffee industry here focuses on "quality" and there are definitely a lot of high quality coffees to choose from, however, Arabica is the only type of coffee that is allowed to be grown here. We happen to live on a coffee farm so we've learned a great deal about coffee since we've been here.
Soda #3 - yummy pescado (fish)
BTW - you can also buy meat, chicken and fish along with other items like popcorn, cotton candy, nuts, oatmeal, beans, home made bread, flowers, plants, clothing and shoes.
It's a one stop shop!
