This site has now been retired. I've moved to my new site Silverknife, where you'll find new blog posts and all my latest projects and photos. These pages will remain for at least a while, as I know some of you are still looking through the archives, but I'm reposting my travel journals and many other articles on the new site. Come and check it out.
I'm checking out at 2pm, so with an early start there's time to do a spot of shopping Mexico City-style before I'm once again loaded down with my baggage. I've spotted a Metro station called Merced, and I deduce from the icon and the relation to Supermercado (supermarket) that it's a market area, at least historically. I go to see whether it's still active.
The Merced is indeed still active, in fact it's hyperactive. An area spanning a full city block and overflowing into the streets around, it's a maze of stalls selling anything you can imagine, in which one can (and I do) get lost for hours. The stalls are generally clustered by type. One region sells Halloween decorations, model skeletons, masks and rubber spiders, another with handmade pots and woven baskets (some woven right there at the stall by chubby Native Mexican women wrapped in colourful blankets).
In another aisle I pass ranks of shining silver tools and kitchenware, tin baths and crockery, while further on are great waist-high barrels of sherbert in flourescent colours, piles of preserved fruit and coconut ice (gathering plague-like clouds of flies and wasps which I find more than a little offputting), and clear plastic bags almost my height full of crisps and bright orange Cheeto-like tubes.
I spend the morning happily immersed in the Merced, and get back to the Hotel Puente with just enough time to pack up my gear and purchases and check out. For the afternoon I move my base of operations to the airport, another of those vast, gleaming structures of steel and glass which could be anywhere in the world. I find a rickety table on the food court next to a power socket, write and read until mid-evening, then take one more Metro trip back to the Boulevard Puerto Aero to spend my last few pesos on a big torta of pork and milanesa (pounded, fried meat in breadcrumbs) to get me through the night, before returning to my table.
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