When one shops in a Mexican store you mostly only find one focus. It will be a shoe store, chicken shop, pharmacy, clothing, etc. Department stores are few and far between.
So shortly after 8 a.m. we walked up to the Mercado. It is a huge industrial metal frame building. Inside are many small booths and we freely roamed around through them to see what was available. Jewelery, shoes, kids clothes, shawls, shirts, pinatas, and more. The entire right side of the building was a great 'food court' but no McDonald's here!! Each stall again had it's food specialty.
We wandered up and down, back and forth and then found the fresh food and meat area. Large shanks of beef and pork hung in many stalls, the vendor flipping a swatter of sorts in order to keep the flies from settling. We saw tables of all kinds of seafood, a variety of fish, crab, shrimp, and then many vendors had dried fish and seafood. The smell was not gross.
I loved the huge pots of cut flowers, white lillies with stems that were more than 3 feet long, richly coloured chrysanthemums, and others. I bought a small bouquet for about $2. Cdn. Many more stalls offered fruit, vegetables, spices, and the ever present tortillas.
One older lady was selling bags of 'hot tamales' so we bought a small bag for our lunch. As we walked around another corner in the place we saw large stalls with ladies making and selling tamales. We were still glad we'd bought them from the older lady who seemed so proud of her own cooking.
This was definitely a superstore on a grand scale. Our Spanish remains pitiful but we blundered our way through and bought a few items.
One of the great reliefs while shopping in that mercado is that merchants did not seem agressive. None of that 'in your face' pushiness that we've run into in other larger tourist cities in Mexico. Here they remain genteel and helpful.
A pleasant experience which I'm sure we'll repeat from time to time.
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