Day Seven

DAY SEVEN



OUR first trip to the new giant hypermarket on the edge of town is enough to make us feel guilty. We’ve been buying our produce in the market, and also other things that we weren’t able to bring with us. But it is sometimes hard to find what you want in the confusion of all the little lanes and people shouting, and we have to keep stopping so the stallholders can kiss Daisy. So we embrace modernity and take a taxi out.

The hypermarket is remarkable in having so few things that we actually want and so very many things that we don’t. I can’t find tonic water (sob), or a changing mat for Daisy, but I can find fourteen different varieties of Tang (a bit like squash, I think) and a bewildering variety of tins of refried beans. Looks like it will be a long time before I have a gin and tonic again.

The supermarket is sufficiently Mexican that you have to leave your bag at the door in a locker and collect it later from a toothless old man who takes his time. It’s also big enough that I keep losing Pabs in it.

I’m terribly tempted to buy a violent pink deodorant called Teen Spirit, just in honour of the Nirvana song, but restrain myself after a quick sniff. Smelling like Teen Spirit for the next month is really not worth the cheap joke.

No one we know who lives here seems particularly sure whether to welcome the march of progress that has brought them the new hypermarket. Mariet remarks that some things are cheaper but other things aren’t, while our friend Mari says it is cold, and it smells. Given that almost nowhere I have been smells more than the local market, that really is an insult.

The supermarket is surprisingly empty, apart from some giggling teenage girls who have clearly come to hang out and flirt with the male shop attendants, but they only have two checkouts open so the queues are still long. I wonder whether it will be a great success in the long run, or whether people will stick to the market.

After my Spanish lesson (the subjunctive, past participles and just about everything else), we go for lunch with Mariet and end up watching Shrek in Spanish with her daughter Itamar. Itamar wants to head butt Daisy, and isn’t keen on taking no for an answer. Meanwhile Paul’s namesake, Pablo (4 months) seems to do little but eat or sleep – though Daisy seems rather interested in him!


Mariet and Enrique are coming for lunch on Sunday, and I’ve promised to cook them something traditionally English. They are strangely desperate for shepherd’s pie, which I think Paul has cooked for them before. However, I know that if I cook it they will just shake salsa all over it, remarking that it “falta chile’. The palate here is not subtle, but after a while it seems wrong not to have chiles with everything.

In the evening we walk through the Zocalo (main square), where a marimba band is playing. People are dancing, and children are selling brightly coloured candyfloss on sticks. The Zocalo is a place for people to hang out and chat, and it is not yet cold enough in the evening to drive them indoors. With Daisy gently walked off to sleep we return to our ‘home’ for a relatively peaceful meal together – well OK you can always hear the marimba in the far distance, but we’re gradually getting used to it.