Mystery produce at Osh Bazaar 

I’ve promised to take my new Italian colleague to Osh Bazaar, the food market where most people in Bishkek go for their weekly shop. My neighbour Lara came home yesterday laden with carrier bags of tomatoes that she’s planning to bottle for the winter. We meet outside Tsum and take the bus to the opposite end of Chui Prospekt. 

As we approach Osh Bazaar, my colleague falls silent and stares excitedly around her, taking in the men with round flat lipyoshka breads piled high on their handcarts, the one-legged beggars propping themselves against the railings, the old ladies selling pathetic collections of second hand shoes and cracked teacups, and all the other buyers and sellers that converge on Bishkek’s biggest food market. 

Seasonal produce

I’m staring too, because every time I come here the bazaar looks different and I notice something new. You can track the evolving seasons by the products on sale here. The last of the summer tomato glut, squashy and misshapen, lie next to regular hothouse fruits, priced ten times as high. Aubergines are small and wizened now, and the pale green peppers have disappeared altogether. In their place are packets of salted red peppers, lots of onions and carrots, and now miniature green turnips. 

My colleague and I wander round Osh Bazaar pursued by a teenage Kyrgyz boy pulling a cart.

“One dollar!” he yells. “I carry your bags! One dollar!”

He’s keen to work for the rare foreigners that have ventured into Osh Bazaar (I’ve never seen any here), but we haven’t bought anything yet; we’re still walking around staring at the produce, and speculating about what the strange things we see there might be. 

Cooking oil scam

I point out the row of tables holding sticky-looking jars of oil, every colour of the spectrum between pale lemon yellow and ruby red. The vendors lift a ladleful when people pass, showing them how their oil flows smoothly back into the jar. 

“Better not buy it here, though,” I say to my colleague. “I just read an article in Vecherniy Bishkek saying Osh Bazaar market inspectors found some people selling industrial oil instead of cooking oil.”

I buy some honey in an old Nescafe jar, then we go to look at the fruit and vegetables. My colleague, who speaks better Russian than I do, gets into the haggling, and demands that every trader gives us a taste of their food before we buy it. It’s fun having a new friend, someone to go around with. We try slices of Sharon fruit that neither of us have tried before, biting into the hard citrus fruit and feeling the acid taste on our teeth. 

Mystery produce

In another aisle men are shovelling little brown pellets that look like the tiny poos my gerbils produced out of sacks and sealing them deftly into tubes. The plastic packets flash between their dark fingers as they work. 

“Try some girls!” they yell. 

“But what is it?”

“Tobacco!”

We’re also mystified by the floury white balls, about the size of marbles, spread out on a Kyrgyz woman’s stall. 

“Are they sugar?”

“Cheese?”

“Mushrooms?”

Every time we make a suggestion the trader laughs harder. 

“Milk!” she gasps at last. I later find out that balls of condensed sour milk are a Kyrgyz speciality.

At the end of our tour around Osh Bazaar we are laden down with flimsy plastic bags that we load onto a marshrutka going back towards Soviet Street.