colorful markets & displays

Everywhere we went, the colorful Mediterranean markets continued to fascinate me. I must have looked at every single stall admiring the creative ways they display fresh fruits, veggies, other foods and local products. It was fun walking around the markets, some of them selling just a particular food product or local specialty. There were stalls selling all kinds of dried fruits and nuts, fruit drinks, hams and sausages, flowers, an assortment of sea salt, unusual local produce, pottery, ceramics and many more.

The very creative and eye-catching display of stalls (above) selling fresh fruits and produce steal the spotlight at Barcelona's La Boqueria Market while a stall selling hams and sausages (below) will make any dedicated meat lover stop and look.

Unusual preserved cactus flowers and other fruits grace this stall (above) at this popular open-air market at Cours Saleya in Nice, France. In the same market, rows and rows of sweet and colorful marzipans (below) attract many buyers and tourists. Too bad, we tried neither one of these specialties.

I must admit these fresh and fragrant roses (above) were quite irresistible but I just couldn't help taking a picture of the glorious looking fresh garlic (below) and as I passed by the stall, I was thinking about adobo, a popular Filipino dish with lots of garlic, and how garlic this fresh will make it so good : )

Another stall at the Nice market selling ceramic olive servers (above) with attached containers for the toothpicks and olive pits. This was just one of the many cute and unusual tableware I saw and liked that I still wish I bought. Alongside the olive servers were an assortment of mustards and oils.

Hand-painted ceramic plates (above) in one of the many shops in San Gimignano, Italy. There were several other shops selling leather bags and local food products.

In Pompeii, a fruit stand (above) selling fresh lemons, citron, oranges, as well as lemon granita and juice for the thirsty tourists who came to see the main attraction here.

All kinds of pasta and pasta shapes (above) you can think of at a Pompeii shop.

Amalfi lemons at a local shop (above). The locals have a good reason to be proud of these lemons which have a more intense flavor and aroma than other lemon varieties. They make all kinds of lemon products from soaps to candy but one of the most popular are limoncellos (shown below).

In a tour bus around Tunis, Tunisia, we passed this truck loaded with fresh carrots and other produce (shown above) on the way to a local market. Colorful hand-painted tangines and other decorative pottery (below) in Tunisia.