Day 2 in Philadelphia, and a visit to Reading Terminal Market was in order. To the uninitiated, Reading Terminal Market is best described as a farmer’s market with an awesome hotchpotch of options. True to its style, and enclosed in a just-right closed space within Center City Philadelphia — 12th and Arch to be precise — Reading Terminal offers a wide variety of foods, from baked goods to flowers, meats & seafood to produce and a number of eateries.

Due to my intense desire to fill as many attractions as I could in my short stay, we hit RTM (sorry, I can’t be expected to type out the entire name each time, and copy-paste stops my smooth flow of typing, but I digress) rather early in the morning, but the place was quite bustling for 8.30 a.m. on a weekday. Since it’s right of Philly’s Market East station, it’s got a perfect location for a quick breakfast, a drop by for lunch during a busy day, or a stopover for supplies to take home at the end of the day. They also offer student discounts on Sundays & Tuesdays, so if you are one, or know one, that’d be the day to go.

The market is a delight to the retina, and ??I’ve tried to capture as many of the colors as I could.

We stocked up on some basic supplies comprising organic vegetables, and attempted a place called the Basic Vegetarian Snack Bar for a quick bite. Our reason for picking them — they had every conceivable dish you could think of, from the chili burger to the traditional Philadelphia Cheesestake — but made with organic vegetarian ingredients. The best description on their menu was for the Soy Chicken Salad (paraphrased) — if we didn’t tell you it was soy, you would never know. We have a confession to make — they were 100% right. It was so good, we took a pound of it back home for a later snack. I’ll drop another confession: along with the garlic and olive bread we picked up, this quantity did not last beyond lunchtime.