This and that and La Merced Mercado

I've been in a funny space this time in DF, less enraptured by the energy and buzz, more irritated by the shitty driving and insane crowds.  Maybe the unsatisfactory accommodations starting my stay have something to do with it.  Maybe I'm doing too many of the same things I do every time I'm here and feeling somewhat bored with it as a result.  I don't know. Maybe it's the social isolation. Except for contact with Alfonso and sometimes his wife, Sylvia, I don't have many connections. Today, my friend, Harry, from Victoria arrived and meeting with him and hanging out was a tonic. But he'll be teaching for much of his time so I will need to discipline myself to become more immersed in this on-line TEFL course that I've signed on to.  I enrolled in it for just that reason, to provide more of a structure and purpose to my days when I'm in foreign countries for an extended time.  Also to be doing something with intrinsic value and the possibility of meeting locals.

The weather has been typical for DF this time of year. Nice warm days in the low to mid 20s C, single digits at night (low mid 70s to low mid 40s F).  It gets cold at night in my room in this old building and there ain't no thermostat.  So I add layers.  I'd conveniently forgotten about this big swing in temperature while looking forward to anything warmer than the Canadian winter, wherever you are in Canada.  It's a typically high elevation sort of climate: warm to hot in the sunshine, cool to cold in the shade.  And changeable.  The other day, an overcast day, I went to the local mercado, Mercado Medellin, for some groceries.  On the way in I passed by a street food vendor specializing in tlacoyos which have become a favourite.  They're blue corn tortillas, spread with a filling (chicharrón or cheese or beans), folded in thirds and dry fried on a comal.  When ordered, the tlacoyo is sliced open, toppings are added (nopales, cheese, onion, cilantro) and served with salsa, red or green.  They're sooo good with a nice crunch to the tortilla.

  While savouring mine, it began to rain lightly but while inside the mercado, thunder suddenly erupted on the roof.  The sky had let loose with a terrific downpour drowning out all other sounds.  I waited under shelter for five or ten minutes, it stopped and I had a dry ride home.  The exact same thing at the same place happened last year when I was here.

For years I've been reading and hearing about the La Merced Mercado, Mexico City's largest retail market, in operation since colonial times.  It has a reputation  as a potentially dodgy place, open prostitution and seedy characters.  So naturally I had to check it out at some point and yesterday was that point.  Predictably there aren't any bike stations around there so I took the subway. There's a stop right in the market and I emerged into what looked like absolute chaos.  

 It was the usual mercado, on steroids.  A labyrinth of stalls selling every imaginable sort of product, each one redundant a thousand times over.  To tell you the truth, I'm not sure if I actually found my into the mercado proper, or only a portion of it.  It covers blocks with different products in different buildings.  Initially I found myself in a clothing area 

Decorations of all sorts

 

The candy section

Send them in

 
In search of produce and meat I wandered around but was totally disoriented and got stuck on an crowded, endless sidewalk with an array of stalls selling nothing interesting, fronting a busy street. 

Nut and seed bars in QUANTITY

On some dismal side streets there were a few produce vendors and warehouses with industrial quantities of, for instance, corn husks.  

 Not for the squeamish: cow's heads used for tacos de cabeza and other delights

 

One vast area was taken up by restaurant equipment and kitchen ware.  My only successful purchases that day were a metal salad bowl and some excellent granola.  

I've seen so many of these big mercados that I realized that, because it was simply the biggest, and maybe the most crowded, it wasn't that interesting.  



 

And, naturally, industrial amounts of basura, garbage, gets generated.














But by then I was totally disoriented, baffled and buffeted by the crowds and realized that my plan to walk back to a bike kiosk wasn't going to work as I had no idea what direction to go in.  So I found the metro station and rode the subway back to known territory.