Aventuras de Compras!

Yes, shopping in SMA is an adventure (here’s a great article about it).  The shopping is a lot like Morocco actually.  Many of the shops sell one type of item, so for meat you go to la carnicería, for bread, la panadaria, etc.  Yesterday morning we went to the Tuesday market, called El Tianguis, which Google Translate tells me is “the flea market”.  It’s a giant weekly market that transforms dusty fields into a place to buy most anything you need – from DVDs of questionable origin to most of the fixins for dinner.  To get there we took two taxis from the center of town (“Siga ese taxi!”), and both of them took a bumpy dirt shortcut across a field.  Adlani and Norah thought it was very adventurous:

The Tuesday  market is very much like the souk in Morocco, except we didn’t see any donkeys and there was not a lot of meat for sale or butchers to make friends with.  We did see giant slabs of pork rind, which made me a little queasy, but that was about it other than the many stalls selling food that they cooked and served right there.  There was one stall that had giant skewers of raw chicken with spices, onions, and who knows what else – kind of like the meat for gyros, except raw.  The cooks would slice some of it down onto the grill, cook it up and serve it:

We also saw churros being cooked in a giant (scary) vat of oil, and the same family also had homemade potato chips.  Norah had the ones with chili powder on them (“Mom, are my eyes watering?”), and you could also get chili sauce on them.  I had to put my foot down on that one – we have not had a lot of tummy issues yet…knock on wood.  I’d like to keep it that way.

There were lots of vendors selling clothes, including undies:

And plenty of Mexican bling:

Chloe and Hannah bought projects to embroider so it’s been like Little House on the Prairie around here.  Norah wants to go back next week and get a kit of her own:

I was intrigued by these hand-operated sewing machines – I think they could be pretty useful but my problem would be finding it when I’m trying to run out of the house and realize that the hem of my pants has unraveled:

I want to take a closer look at the old metal sometime.  Maybe there is a lock mixed in!

The fruits and vegetables here in Mexico are AMAZING – so fresh and delicious.  We’ve seen some that we didn’t recognize – like rambutan, but we’re open to trying new things.  Well, most of us.  Adlani was very excited that Bonanza had Kraft Mac & Cheese.  Bonanza is a grocery store that has most of the “dry goods” that we need plus milk, cheese, etc.  We bought cheddar cheese there yesterday for our dinner of soft tacos, which was very exciting to the cheese lovers in our party.  We made friends with a lady at the fruit and vegetable market in town (Mercado Ignacio Ramirez), and I asked her where to buy tortillas.  She directed us to an old lady sitting outside next to a basket.  We would have had no way to know what was in the basket, but it was full of corn tortillas.  I can’t remember how much she charged for them but they were very inexpensive.

Here are some fruits and veggies from the Tuesday market.  At this particular vendor, I asked which peppers were not hot, and he sold me 3 smallish green peppers.  When I started chopping them to add to the guacamole I was making for dinner, I thought I should taste them just in case.  HOLY HOT PEPPER!  My hands burned for hours just from cutting half of one.  I don’t know if the problem was my Spanish or his definition of “not hot”, or a combination of the two.

Ben is going to be so excited because there are lots of vendors selling prickly pear fruit (or “prickly pecker” as Aliya accidentally called it).  It will remind him of Morocco.  The red fruit in the photo is rambutan.  It’s REALLY good but looks very weird.

Pomegranates for one of our breakfast faves…fruit and granola mixed together:

Check out the tower of honey!

And the roses were beautiful!  The photos have a weird hue to them because of the various colored tarps forming the roof.

There’s something to be said for walking all over town to various shops and vendors, hauling it all back home, cooking dinner, and cleaning up.  At home I’m always so busy that I don’t usually enjoy cooking, let alone shopping or cleaning up, so Ben ends up doing a lot of the cooking.  Here I’ve been able to settle into the more relaxed pace and it’s very nice – I’m not sure if I can go back.  When Ben comes next Saturday we’re going to have to teach him everything we’ve learned but I know he’ll adapt right away.  Luckily we have a map that we’re slowly marking with our favorite locations, like where to find the tequila-flavored helado.

We had another great day today but I have to get some actual work done, so más mañana!