“What I did at the weekend”

On Saturday I went shopping. Not shopping shopping, just food shopping. And somehow it took me SIX HOURS. I did take a couple of buses to get to a really nice open-air mostly-food market in a village nearby, and then a bus back into town to troll round my favourite bakery and the stall with the nice guavas and then go to the supermarket, and I did get distracted by buying CDs and looking at things… but six hours!

Generally, I like shopping in Mexico. The exceptions are when I am bored of always buying the same things and not having as much choice as we’re used to at home, and when I am looking for something specific like string or kitchen scales, which you’d think would be easy to find, but no…

But I generally do like shopping in Mexico. I like the market at ISSSTE, stalls piled high with fruit or vegetables—some with heaps of everything, some only selling tomatoes, or mangoes, or pineapples—mixed in with stalls selling cheese, or bootleg cds, or flowers, or every kind of dried goods, or cleaning paraphernalia, or great mounds of second-hand clothes. All very ordinary, but a pleasure, to go looking for emerald-greenest spinach and the prettiest oyster mushrooms and the most deeply flushed tomatoes. I like the multitudes of little shops in town: sacks full of dog food or beans by the kilo; shoelaces in every colour of the rainbow; warm, sugary bakeries full of bread and cakes and pastries that you pile onto silver trays; stationers with everything on shelves and under glass cases; two or three freezers filled with every kind of fruity ice lolly; great thick candles two feet long hanging like stalactites; endless mobile phone shops; strange masks; children’s hula hoops…

And then I end up with my arms dropping off, going to the supermarket for milk and toilet rolls and breakfast cereal. In an ideal world, small shops all the way, but I think a shopping trip of more than six hours would be just silly. Plus the supermarket sells bars of proper chocolate, half-hidden down on a low shelf, and that is extremely important…

I also like the fact that, out shopping, I’m always seeing little things that surprise me or amuse me. So, here are some of the things I saw this Saturday:

- This CD:
Placebo…Paris Hilton…Crazy Frog…
I think the stallholder was slightly puzzled as to why this made me chuckle so.

- This wedding cake:
Not only does it have six tiers, it’s got flying buttresses to accommodate additional side-cakes! Words cannot do justice to this supreme example of the cake-decorating art, but you’ll see why I stood and stared for a while.

It strikes one as a ridiculous, impossible, fairy-tale castle of a cake. But it makes a lot more sense when I consider that one of my colleagues just got married and he told me that 500 people came. And he didn’t seem to consider that an outrageous number of guests.

- Mice. Many mice.

I walked past the petshop where I buy sawdust, and stopped to have a look at the animals—as I usually do, longing to rescue them from their cages and take them home. So today there weren’t any puppies, chickens, rabbits…. but there were a few very cute tiny mice running around their tank. Then I realised that the plastic tube inside the tank was FULL of mice. It was two or three inches across, eight inches long, and contained I would guess about fifty mice, sleeping and squirming and – at the ends – jockeying for position inside the tube. If you’ve never seen an unfeasibly large number of mice all in one place, take it from me, it’s a weirdly hypnotic sight. They were almost all white, but there was a little brown one running around like a toddler in a toyshop and a white one with black stripes across its bottom, lying sleepily on the top of the tube. Ladies and gentlemen, I fell in love. I was this close to adding a couple of mice to my menagerie, but the sensible side of me said it wouldn’t be responsible to get more pets for only a few months.

So then I went and bought an extremely lovely and characterful pot plant instead. Which I instantly anthropomorphised and got fond of and just knew it would be hard to leave it behind…

- Pigs’ trotters

on display in a butcher’s. Yup—entirely, profoundly disgusting. Shudder.

- Parker ink.

And Parker cartridges, and Parker pens. I was in the biggest stationer’s in town, nonetheless a pretty small place, full of dim glass cabinets. In this nonedescript town in Mexico I could buy pigs’ trotters, or twenty live chicks, or an infinite number of shoelaces, or any kind of shampoo you can find in your average Boots, or the latest cinema releases on bootleg DVD. I would just never have expected Parker pens.

- Lots of babies

Babies are not a rare sight in Mexico, it being a country where people tend to marry young and have lots of babies. Babies are taken everywhere, wrapped in a blanket when it gets cold, always carried, given lots of kisses and affection (from fathers and well as mothers). I can count the number of pushchairs I’ve seen on one hand, but the blanket-covered bundle over one shoulder is ubiquitous… and, connectedly, I think, you almost never hear a baby cry.

However, on Saturday the baby population seemed to have doubled. Everywhere you looked people were walking along cradling babies in their arms. And quite a lot of those babies were made of plaster.

In the last few weeks there has appeared, in a place where seasonable markets appear, a Baby Market. Or perhaps I should call it a Baby Jesus Market. I surmise it is to do with Easter, though that is a long way off… I really should ask someone.

Every single stall (of maybe a hundred) sells plaster baby Jesuses, and/or related paraphernalia. They are all eerily similar – not cute, but with preternaturally adult faces and sad eyes, like icons. Some of them are lying down, like babies, and you can buy baskets for them to lie in, and little embroidered gowns and baby clothes. Some of them are sitting up (though maybe they’re the same underneath the clothes) on thrones, wearing rich robes. Each stall will have several on display, each one labelled and wearing a particular intricate outfit. There are particular recurring Jesuses, like El Niño de las Uvas, whose robe is embroidered with grapes, or El Niño de las Rosas, with roses, but there are also things like Doctor Jesus and Graduate Jesus, which seem to speak of personal hopes.
One of the things I loved was that, mixed up with the thrones and the golden crowns, you could buy plastic baby-bottles and rattles to cosset your little Niño — His dual identity, infant child and king of kings, neatly expressed. I also loved the many stalls with little signs saying ‘Reparamos los Niños Dios’, where limbs were reattached, fingers remodelled, plaster smoothed into chips, skin restored—with noisy spray-painting machines—and details painted back in. Clearly people take care of their fragile plaster babies, carrying them home oh-so-gently wrapped in little blankets, infants forever as the family grows old — with a touch of new plaster and paint here and there.