Travel, Food, and the Marketplace

For me, the marketplace enables a fascinating and inspiring mixing of social, cultural, and economic variables. Unlike other facets of human existence, intolerance for difference doesn't make sense within the context of a market, instead there exists an explicit encouragement for diversity. Greater variety de facto yields a better market experience, and as such, any tropes of homogeneity remain, at the very least, boring. Vendors sell different products: vegetables, grains, meats, cheeses, cloth, jewelry. Beautifully, the point can be reduced to a celebration of inter-dependence, the reciprocity of exchange. I have best experienced the inspiration of markets through my travels abroad. This sentiment. i.e. a love for markets, was echoed in a blog post I recently found.

It was a travel blog called Jet Set Zero. It documents the journey of several twenty-somethings who travel the world, yet there are three primary caveats:

1. We experience our host culture through our local friendships, local jobs, local living.
2. We give ourselves 90 days in each location to succeed or fail.
3. We tell our story openly, honestly, and completely.

I think it's a neat premise. Obviously, it focuses on traveling, but as the following blog post suggests, an integral part of travel is the food experience. The pictures of the Turkish marketplace make my head spin.

A Turkish Market Place