FIELD NOTES · OAXACA, MEXICO
The market opens at six
Before the stalls fill, the hour the market is for the people who cook, not the people who photograph it.
The good stuff is gone by nine. Here is how to be there while it is still worth being there.
A market at midday is a performance for visitors. The same market at six is a working room, deliveries, arguments about price, a woman frying the day's first tlayuda because the man who sells her the masa is already packing up.
You do not need a plan. You need to be awake, and to buy the thing that has a queue of locals in front of it, and to eat it standing up before you have decided whether you like it.
What the early hour buys you
Cooler air, honest prices, and the version of a place that exists before it is dressed for you. The stallholders have time. Ask what is good today and they will tell you, because at six the answer still matters.
A market is most itself in the hour before it remembers it has an audience.
Go back at noon if you like. Buy the postcard. But you will have already seen the real thing, and it will have cost you nothing but an alarm.
Been somewhere that changed how you travel? Tell us about it.