A day off was great, because I knew that others were working, while I was doing something very relaxed.

‘Work hard, play hard’ as my cousin said. That’s why I went to the farmers market together with Kirstin who also had taken the day off. At the farmers market, there was a lawn full of white and green market stalls and a few food trucks. The market was also known as a ‘pure market’ because all the ingredients were 100% made of something. It did not matter if it was 100% butter, as long as it was pure. Even if the food was not completely pure, the sellers would get away with it by indicating that nobody looked as pure as they did. Some of the female sellers with their 100% red cheeks, made them look like German mulled wine girls.

They sold everything that you could think of, from homemade potato chips to scones, and from special butter to special bread made in a charcoal oven. It was surprised that they didn’t sell themselves. There were also chickens turning rounds on a wheel of fortune while being roasted. The impossible combinations that we ate at the pure market were very weird. For lunch I would eat half a burrito, curry and potato chips, which was washed away with a cappuccino with soy milk.

There was always a stall that sold something insignificant. Where only a few cans with folders stood, from which we should be able to deduce something. It was something, but what exactly it was, was very unclear. The people behind the stall themselves also did not know what to do with their trade. They stood as if they were suffering from any contact with the shoppers.

The other visitors of the farmers market were sitting on wooden benches enjoying organic and artisan-brewed-at-home-in-the-cellar cider. They had bought the cider from a hipster with a beard and a logger’s shirt. Meanwhile, they listened to a band that played a bit further on. The sales tactics on the pure market had become more commercial. There was a girl in a white chef’s shirt with a bowl of curry, who asked us if we wanted a curry. Attracted by the free curry, we said yes, to be escorted to the makeshift cashier by the girl to pay five pounds for some mush in a tiny container.

At four o’clock, most market stallholders were too tired to advertise their wares and allowed people to come to their stalls. They were knackered from standing for hours behind their stalls, and because they had forgotten to wear their thermo-underwear. After a while I came across the peripheral figures on the market that were not so pure, and they were located in the far corners of the market. At one end of the market, for example, a hippie of around 40 years old in brightly colored clothes that represented the Jamaica feeling was selling clothes. The people who bought here also loved ‘love & peace’. I felt like this very much after my visit to the pure market and that was a better feeling than after a normal working day. With a full bag containing butter, jasmine tea, honey, three bags of home-made chips and olive oil, we walked into the subway.