Adventure #1: into the unknown (or, the supermarket)

My actual boss is David, the head of the communications team, but he was away when I arrived and I didn’t meet him until a week later. The man I often think of (affectionately) as (one of) my boss(es) is Mike, who is the science writer/editor and gives me more things to do.

Mike is Lovely. He is married to a Mexican and has lived here a long time, so he knows everything and everyone and speaks excellent Spanish. He is also, I think, possessed of real generosity of spirit, and is a nice man. He has answered innumerable stupid questions of mine, given advice, been my translation service, organised things for me and generally done me an awful lot of favours to help me settle in and feel happy. The greatness of Mike cannot, in fact be overestimated: for example, we are already trading friendly insults, and conversations about work things have a tendency to deteriorate into conversations about interesting things, like, today, poetry, with the result that we have begun swapping poems.

On my first Thursday in Mexico, Mike took me shopping, and being Lovely, he took me the scenic route so I could see a bit of the surrounding villages. The drive is windy up into the mountains, casually beautiful wildflowers by the road, and gnarly prickly pears.

And then we turned round a corner and into a fairy story. All the streets of La Purification, the village we were driving through, were festooned with bunting from Independence Day. But not just any bunting – it was every colour of the rainbow, beautiful, bright, vibrant colours, and it wasn’t just plain triangles – the flags were rectangular, and cut out in designs a bit like a doily. In amongst the coloured flags were strings of things like flowers made of cellophane and foil, which caught the sunlight. Looking down the street I could see what seemed like endless bright flags sparkling in the sunlight, into the far distance. I don’t really remember what the village was actually like at all, just that it seemed beautiful, joyful, a charmed place. There was magic in the air, and in an instant I fell in love with Mexico a little. Partly because it was beautiful, but also because people had wanted and seen fit to transform their village and make it beautiful. Of course, I didn’t have a camera.

In Texcoco Mike showed me important places, like the bus station and the shop that sells Twinings tea, and we went shopping in the market and the supermarket. I buzzed about looking at things, while Mike pointed me in right directions and carried bags and pushed my trolley in a manner which clearly indicated eventual sainthood.

Grocery shopping in new places is always kind of exciting, and there are a number of exciting things to buy in Mexico, including:
- Guavas. I love guavas so very much. And they are so good here. You can also buy guava juice, guava candy, guava squash, guava cake…
- Prickly pear leaves (or whatever leaves are called on a cactus?). Here they are a vegetable. Obviously I had to buy one, never having eaten cactus before. When you cook it it kind of oozes stickily, and it has a pretty strong taste all of its own. Or at least, the way I cooked it it did.
- Baked goods. You get a tray and tongs and you’re loose among the tasty morsels. I was quite restrained, considering.
- Dried hibiscus flowers, sold in big packets to make tea. I liked the idea of making tea with flowers very much… Mike waited til we got to the checkout to tell me that it makes you wee.

Texcoco is intrinsically exciting to me because it is Mexico, but it is an unremarkable sort of place – I have not, for example seen postcards for sale anywhere. It’s a mixture of slick, modern shops and slightly murky little places stuffed full of their wares. Street stands sell all kinds of edibles, the traffic’s a little unpredictable and so are the pedestrians. Every vertical surface is painted: shop fronts are painted (although I did see an illuminated psychiatrist’s sign) and any wall that isn’t a shopfront is painted with advertisements or graffiti or both. I think I'll be happy here, or happy enough.