On an almost crisp or should I say less hot and humid Sunday in Mérida you have a smorgasbord of activities to choose from. You can choose to walk your dog along the beautiful Paseo Montejo, you can bicycle the historic streets of centro or you can head north to Colonia Chuburna to an open-air market called a tianguis. Since I am an avid estate sale and flea market shopper, that is exactly what a couple of my girlfriends and I decided to do. With the morning a comfortable temperature and clouds threatening at least a sprinkle or two, we head out shopping bags in tow to see what goodies we might unearth.
The pretty and simple red stucco church has parishioners spilling out onto the lawn, and the smell of street corn drifts through the air as we begin our expedition.
Many vendors have used clothing, which was clean, on hangers and in good shape, my friend Sara sorts through the clothes for interesting fabrics to make designer pillows. Linda searches the new and used jewelry for interesting beads; she takes apart her finds to create new earrings, bracelets and adornments on her hand knitted pillows and shawls. I just like the thought of finding anything interesting. I buy a little cross body tapestry tote for 25 pesos and admire a large wood carving which started out being priced at 1600 pesos, but by the time I began to walk away the vendor had reduced it to 1200 pesos, with no haggling on my part. As interesting as it was, I passed it up.
What I could not pass up was at Alejandro’s plant stand where I bought a lavender plant and two tropical plants of some kind which were very reasonably priced.
After we had completed our tour of the tianguis, we stopped in to see Miguel at his vivero (nursery). From the street it looks like a small place with nice plants, truth is it is more like maneuvering through a well-kept jungle, flowers of every color lighting our way.
I choose two gardenia plants with fragrant white blooms and four bags of fine composted coffee colored dirt.
Our shopping complete and our tummy’s growling, Miguel suggests a cocina economica where we dined on hot off the grill chicken, tortillas and macaroni soup. Lunch including drink set me back a whopping 46 pesos ($3.50 usd).
I dropped my friends off and headed to Casa Sur for a wonderful Sunday siesta!
Fun! Sounds like my kind of day. I can't wait to have days like this. Thanks for sharing. PQ
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