In most places around the world, the food you eat every day doesn’t come from plastic in a grocery store. It is obtained from fresh food markets in your city. It may be a market building with individual stalls for specific merchants or framers selling right out of the back of their trucks in a market on the city’s central square, but it is always fresh and good. Farmers markets may be a recent concept in the United States, but everywhere else has kept the tradition alive.
Visiting a food market is a good way to understand the local diet and interact with locals. The very best food comes from the market. In Budapest’s Central Market, visiting stalls filled with local delicacies you can understand the importance of the pepper or pork to the local diet. In Provence, fresh vegetables rule the day. In Peru’s Sacred Valley, the markets are filled with corn and potatoes. We love visiting the local food market on our travels. Here are some of our favorite food markets around the world.
The sweet sounds of a jazz trombone, the first crunchy bite of a shrimp po’boy, the sight of a wrought-iron balcony decked out with Mardi Gras beads. All this and more is what makes New Orleans, Louisiana, like nowhere else.
The first thing you see in Gouda isn’t a surprise—it’s cheese. It hangs above the streets and floats in the canals. And, Thursday mornings, it’s neatly stacked in the middle of the town square for the Gouda Cheese Market.
Exquisite architecture, fresh seafood, a vibrant city with an historic core, and some of the best wine in the world—in a nutshell, this is Bordeaux, France.
Oxford was the place that made me want to become a traveler. It took me 20 years to return, and I spent two days both wandering in my old footsteps and doing some things for the first time.
A little bit European and a little bit Canadian, Montreal is a city that loves good food, good art, and getting outside at every opportunity, no matter the weather. In the spirit of its French settlers, Montreal teems with joie de vivre.
Tables filled with exotic produce, deep fryers sizzling with fritters, Sicilian nonnas snaking their carts through the crowds to visit the vendors they’ve purchased from for decades. It’s just another typical morning in the Palermo markets.
Dazzling colors, canals, the wonder of half-timbered buildings that look like a perfect illustration—these are the things of Colmar, France.
We expected Palermo to be gritty, rough-around-the-edges, largely without charm or intrigue. What we found was a city with blemishes, but also with a mix of fascinating influences, amazing food, friendly people, and a cultural and religious history stretching back for millennia.
In Copenhagen, you can visit the Meatpacking District, take a spin through animated Tivoli Gardens and even visit the beach on your way to the picturesque old harbor, all in a walk that barely breaks two miles. But that’s just a fraction of the things to do in this colorful old city.
Most advice about Athens says that you can everything in this enormously historic city in one day. While that may get you the highest of the highlights, there’s more to Athens than that.
