This is the view outside my office window right now. Hope it rains soon — we need it.
Mexico City
More Mexico City street sounds: The wandering curtain-fixer
I was at the nail salon in Polanco yesterday when I thought I heard a rooster crowing. Then I realized, wait — that’s not a rooster, that’s a man. He was yelling the same phrase, something unintelligible, over and over.
I asked the nail lady who he was, and she said, “Oh, he fixes curtains.”
A wandering curtain-fixer! We don’t get those guys near our apartment. Even though I live next door to a fabric store.
When I left the salon, I found him: a guy maybe in his 30’s, wearing a backpack and nice jeans. To yell, he’d cup his hand on one side of his mouth. Then he’d walk on, whistling a little tune.
Listen below — I think he’s saying “Arreglo cortinaaaaaaaas!” Sometimes he’d throw in a “persianas” as well, which is the Spanish word for venetian blinds. You can also hear him whistling.
I’m not sure exactly what “arreglo cortinas” would mean in this instance. Does he hang curtains? Measure them? Fix broken curtain rods?
More Mexico City markets: Mercado San Cosme
Tostadas de pata at Mercado San Cosme in Col. San Rafael
The first time I went to Mercado San Cosme, a woman at a comida corrida stand called me cielo.
“Qué le doy cielo? Tenemos lechita, atolito, cafecito…” What can I give you, heaven? We have a little milk, a little atole, a little coffee…
I’ve gone to the market a few more times since then, and it’s become one of my favorites. The vendors are friendly and everything’s clean. Plus the surrounding neighborhood is charming, in an urban Mexico City kind of way. A stand outside the market sells thick slices of cake, in all different flavors; if you walk down Avenida San Cosme, the busy avenue directly north of the market, you’ll find open-air nail salons, advertised by plastic hands tinged in glittery acrylics.
Penny included the market as part of her photo workshop, so we stopped there one morning a few weeks ago. I felt a little more at ease taking pictures of strangers this time, but still not entirely comfortable — which means I need more practice.
I’m itching to visit another market. Any suggestions for which place I should visit next? And if you own a camera and live in Mexico City, do you want to come?
The cake stand outside the market
Filling a gordita with cilantro, onion and cheese
Check out those squash blossoms. They're one of my favorite quesadilla fillings.
Filling a quesadilla with cheese, before it hits the fryer
Puffy, golden quesadillas, from a stand in front of the market
What I love about Mexico City’s Centro Histórico
The tiny patios, thick with honeysuckle and geraniums that hang from the railings, the clothes on the line, innocuous ghosts the wind sets flying between the green interjections of the parrot with a sulfurous eye, and suddenly, a slender stream of light; a canary singing;
the azure of the lunch-shops and the solferino of the cantinas, the smell of sawdust on the brick floor, the mirrored bar, ambiguous altar where genies with insidious powers sleep captive in the multicolored bottles;
…
the fair and its stalls of frying foods where, amidst the coals and aromatic smoke, the hierophants with cinnamon eyes celebrate the marriage of substances and the transformation of smells and flavors while they slice up meat, sprinkle salt and snowflakes of cheese over bright-green nopals, shred lettuce, bearer of tranquil sleep, grind the solar corn, and consecrate bunches of iridescent chilies;
the fruits and the sweets, gilded mountains of mandarins and sloes, the golden bananas, blood-colored prickly pears, ocher hills of walnuts and peanuts, volcanoes of sugar, towers of amaranth seed cakes, transparent pyramids of biznagas, nougats, the tiny orography of earthly sweetness, the fortress of sugarcane, the white jicamas huddled together in tunics the color of earth, the limes and the lemons: the sudden freshness of the laughter of women bathing in a green river…
— Excerpted from “1930: Scenic Views” by Octavio Paz, originally printed in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957-1987, translated by Eliot Weinberger.
A morning at Mercado Merced, and being a tourist again
Banana stalks, trimmed of their leaves, bunched together at Mercado Merced
Mercado Merced is one of the biggest markets in Mexico City. Up until recently, I wasn’t a fan. I did my shopping as quickly as I could and got the heck out of there, before the crowds could swallow me up. The place felt like the subway during rush hour. Except with offal just a few inches from my face.
Penny said she wanted to visit Merced for her photography workshop, the one I was helping her with as her guide and fixer. I tried to dissuade her.
“I’m overwhelmed every time I go, and I live here,” I said.
“I think it’ll be okay,” she said.
I still wasn’t convinced, but Penny enticed me with conchas at El Popular. So off we went one Saturday, after breakfast, the five of us, all women: Cindy, a photographer from San Francisco; Susan, a photographer from Washington state; Penny and I, and Averie, a blogger from San Diego.
At 8:30 a.m., Merced was the quietest I’d seen. The dude advertising anti-fungal medicine was there on the Circunvalación, blaring his ad full blast. (“Do you have problems with fungus? On your fingernails? Elsewhere?”) People bustled about the streets, getting on and off the peseros. The clothing and shoes vendors, the ones directly in front of the produce building, hadn’t opened yet. That meant we could walk in peace. No loud music, no taco vendors yelling about diez por diez, and nobody heaving gigantic bags of merchandise into our elbows and shoulders.
Mercado Merced is not just one market. It’s a complex of several buildings ringed with dozens (hundreds?) of open-air stands. These vendors sell anything from blenders to scrubbing brushes, to strainers for your tomato caldillo. To get to the meat and produce, you must walk past these vendors first. Or you can take the metro, which exits directly into the fruit-and-vegetable building. The most confusing thing to do is to take a cab to Merced, because it’s impossible to see anything but a sea of tarps. (We took a cab, but only because I knew where we were going.)
I hadn’t looked at Merced with a tourist’s eyes in a long time. The market awed me when I first moved here, with its dried chiles stacked over my head and its energy. I wanted to bring my camera several times. But that urge gradually faded away. I wasn’t a gringa tourist anymore, I was a chilanga who actually bought her dried corn and tamale flour here.
Since I had to leave fairly soon, Penny offered to walk around with me and help me with my camera settings. This meant I had to take photos and look for moments — moments meaning people. The idea scared me. What if the subject got mad and yelled? What if they glared at me? Penny said that if anyone didn’t want their picture taken, no pasa nada, I should just move on.
After a few minutes, I found my first moment: a guy tearing banana leaves off the plant’s long stalks. I liked that he was framed by bunches of plants that he’d already cleaned. I took out my camera and hesitantly started taking a few photos.
“Get closer!” Penny urged.
I got a little closer, and the guy gave me a funny look.
“Keep going. Stay there. Ignore him,” Penny said.
I stayed where I was and kept snapping.
The pictures were not particularly fantastic. But I felt like I’d crossed a line. It was like that first time I rode across Chapultepec Avenue on my bike, pedaling furiously, worried that someone would hit me and I’d get in an accident. Halfway across I realized it was a beautiful, breezy day, and all I had to do was forget about the traffic and relax and feel the wind in my hair. The banana-leaf guy probably thought I was a weirdo, but once I stopped thinking about him, I could concentrate on what he was doing: running a knife down a smooth, green leaf, folding its ends over each other, quickly, expertly. Watching him without fear — this is where the magic was.
My heart pounding (I took a picture of this guy and he didn’t get mad at me!) I told Penny I wanted to hit the meat market. I’d wandered around there on a recent shopping trip, gawking — I know I’m supposed to be a chilanga, but I couldn’t help it — at the chicharrón prensado stacked up eight and nine rows high. Do you know how insane that is? Mountains of chicharrón prensado, destined for the city’s gordita stands. The meat market stood for so many things I loved about Mexico City: the chaos, the absurdity, and all of its glorious pig parts used in so many different ways.
This time I was a little more bold.
A vendor chopping chicharrón prensado
In all, I spent about 40 minutes in the market before I had to leave. But it was enough to make me feel giddy — and just the teensiest bit guilty. Where had I been this past year or so? Why hadn’t I taken more pictures? I lived in one of the greatest food cities in the world, and I have all of this at my fingertips. I needed to remember that more.
For some amazing pictures of Mercado Merced, and Mexico City street food, you should visit Susan’s blog.
Sexism, crime and taxis in Mexico City
An authorized "Pink Taxi" in Puebla, which only picks up women.
I’ve lived in Mexico City for two-plus years without a car. In that time, I’ve only had female cab drivers twice — once coming back from the bus station in 2009, and once a few weeks ago, when I was returning from a doctor’s appointment in Polanco.
Apparently more than 800 female drivers work in the city, according to an article published last year in Milenio. A 2008 article from Inside Mexico indicated that there could be thousands more, but the overwhelming majority aren’t officially registered.
As a woman I’d love to see more female cab drivers, especially in crowded areas where there are no taxi sitios. It’s still not safe in Mexico City for single women to hail cabs off the street. Female customers traveling alone can be robbed, beaten or raped.
I was really interested in how this female cabbie got her job, so we struck up a conversation. To my surprise, she seemed eager to share her story.
The driver’s name was Clara Dominguez, and she said she ended up as a cabbie four years ago after being laid off from her job in sales.
“I did very well in sales — very well,” she said, as we zoomed down Thiers, a busy avenue that connects Polanco to Reforma. “My boss wanted younger women.”
…
Christmastime at Mercado Medellín in the Colonia Roma
I’ve been kind of a Christmas grinch lately.
It’s not a fun time to be living in Mexico City. The traffic is twice as bad. Drivers become despots of their own car-kingdoms, leaning on their horns at any pedestrian in their way. (Even if us walkers have the light!) Christmas lights blink wildly on random street corners, part of these pop-up markets on the sidewalk. And there are no taxis available.
I had a whole post planned last week about how Christmas had turned me into a ball-busting chilanga who glares at everyone. At the end I’d asked for advice: what do I to make my spirit feel a little brighter?
I realized the answer before I could post anything. For me, getting into the spirit meant staying home and curling up with Crayton while listening to Christmas music and decorating our tree. It meant making ponche spiked with brandy. And visiting a market specifically to marvel at the Christmas items — not the hurried, in-and-out visit I normally do.
Last week I took a trip to Mercado Medellín in the Roma, which is where I buy my dried chiles and mole pastes. It’s also one of the stops on Eat Mexico’s Taco Tour.
Like nearly every market in the city right now, they’ve got piles of winter fruit for making ponche, which is the typical warm punch enjoyed during the holidays in Mexico. Dozens of piñatas and their long, papery streamers dangle from the ceiling.
Sugarcane, called caña in Spanish, is peeled and chopped used in ponche
Tejocotes, called Hawthorne apple in English, taste somewhere between an apple and a pear. They're peeled, seeded, halved and boiled until soft for ponche.
Guavas are at their freshest and most aromatic in December. They can literally perfume an entire room.
Tangerines aren't used in ponche, but they're plentiful around this time of year. They're called mandarina in Spanish.
After buying my ponche fruit, I discovered an area I’d never visited before, a hallway lined with fondas selling romeritos, bacalao and buñuelos. I asked the woman at a fonda called “Sonia” if I could have half romeritos and half bacalao, and she agreed.
Last year I had trouble getting into the whole romeritos-drowned-in-mole thing, but now the dish is growing on me. Good mole is key.
The romeritos are on the left.
A pot of bacalao from Chucho's, a fonda next door to Sonia's inside the Mercado Medellín
Buñuelos, with a pitcher of piloncillo syrup
After leaving the market, I felt much better, and I no longer wanted to kill any of the honking drivers on the streets. I even stopped at the Christmas tchotchke market and debating buying some hand-painted ornaments.
I’d still like to know: Are you feeling grinchy this year, too? What are you doing to get into the spirit of things?
The safest way to eat on the street in Mexico City
A sweet, pineapple-flavored tamale from a street stand in Col. Roma
It’s a myth that eating any street food in Mexico City will make you sick.
But if you’re not used to eating on the street here, you shouldn’t just pick any stand. One of the most common questions I get through my Eat Mexico tours is: “How do you choose where to take us?”
Here are the guidelines I use when planning our Eat Mexico tour routes.
1. Pick a street food stand that looks crowded. This means several people standing up and eating in a cluster around the stand. If the stand is empty, and you don’t have a personal recommendation from someone else who’s eaten there, do not eat there.
2. Glance around and see if the stand looks clean. Are there stains everywhere? Dirty plates and napkins? If so, pass. I also pass on places where the food just sits in one big pile, as opposed to clean clay pots, or tupperware or stainless steel containers.
Plastic buckets are a common way to store various quesadilla or taco fillings in Mexico City. The ones above are quite large, which denotes high volume, which means the place most likely has great food.
3. Who takes the money? It’s a good sign if the person preparing the food and the person accepting payment are two different people. Smaller stands can’t afford this luxury, so make sure they place a piece of plastic over their hands when receiving cash or change.
4. The food must be freshly prepared. Some stands in Mexico City prepare a lot of food beforehand, and it just sits out. They don’t even necessarily warm it for you — it just goes from the container right into your tortilla. (My one exception here is tacos de canasta, which by definition sit out all day, steaming in a basket. They’re still really good.) These stands won’t automatically make you sick, but they just don’t taste as good. It’s a much tastier experience to watch the taquero make your taco right in front of you, or to watch the older woman pat the masa into a tlacoyo.
A woman prepares fresh quesadillas and tlacoyos at a street stand in Col. Roma
5. Feel free to make small talk while you eat, if you speak Spanish. Most stand-owners are nice and they’ll answer your questions, especially if you’re a foreigner. Ask, “Cuántos años llevan aquí, en este esquina?” which means, “How many years have you been here, at this corner?” Many stands have been on certain corners for decades. If you’ve found the tlacoyo stand with the little old woman with the gray braids who says, “I’ve been here 40 years,” you’ve struck gold.
6. Go during peak hours. This helps you get a better idea of which stands are the most crowded. In Mexico City, peak street food hours are generally 10 or 10:30 a.m., or 2:30 to about 4 p.m. (And then perhaps 8 p.m., when folks are getting off work.) Be aware that if you’re searching for street food at 6 or 7 p.m., some stands are closing up for the day, and you’re going to get the dregs of their daily product.
Do you have any tips you use when eating street food, either here or elsewhere? Feel free to share below.
Tacos de canasta with salsa verde, from a street stand in Condesa
Fresh chamomile tea, and a new Mexico City organic market
One of the perks of living in Mexico City is that fresh chamomile is available almost everywhere. Of course, when I first moved here, I had no idea what it was — I thought vendors were selling a miniature type of daisy. Figured it was some fresh herb that cleaned out your kidneys, or something.
Only recently did I realize that those daisies were actually wild chamomile. I’ve been trying to kick my coffee habit, so I bought a bunch for the first time on Sunday at the Mercado el 100, a new weekly outdoor market that specializes in organic products.
The market launched a few Sundays ago in Roma, and then it moved to Parque México in Condesa. It’ll move again this weekend to Casa de Francia in Col. Juárez.
The market is fairly small, but it’s got a decent variety of products for sale — two vendors sell fresh produce (scored some gorgeous basil at one stand a few weeks ago), while the rest offer ready-made goods such as tortillas, jams, dried xoconostle, agave syrup, coffee.
The neat thing is that there isn’t any other outdoor market like this in the city. The tianguis sells produce and other products, but most of it comes from the Central de Abastos, which gets in turn gets it from large industrialized farms in Mexico. Nick Gilman has a detailed article about the Mercado el 100 on his blog, if you want to know more.
As for the chamomile tea: the fresh version has a much grassier, herbal flavor than the dried versions I’ve bought in the store. Just be careful not to add too much, as chamomile is a mild laxative.
Fresh Chamomile Tea
Makes about 3 cups
Note: I’ve heard some folks say they throw in the entire plant into the pot, and not just the flowers. I tried it this way and the resulting tea turned out green! And it tasted much more strongly of grass. So I prefer the flowers only. The taste obviously depends on your palate, but a good rule of thumb is one tablespoon of flowers per cup of tea.
2 tablespoons fresh chamomile flowers, rinsed
About 3 cups of water
Boil water and add chamomile flowers. Let boil for one to two minutes, turn off the flame, and then steep for five more minutes or “hasta que tenga su colorcito,” as the vendor told me. (Translation: “Until it has it’s little color,” which means until it’s turned a deep yellow.) Strain the flowers and serve.
A Mexico City Bicentenario report: food, grito, dancing and… stomach problems
I know I kept talking about how crazy the Bicentenario was going to be. And no doubt it was, especially for folks near the Zócalo. (Check out the official Zócalo Bicentenario pictures, complete with flames and fireworks.) From my perspective, the Reforma party was actually kind of subdued. There was music and fireworks, but everyone watched respectfully. And the crowds weren’t as big as I’d thought.
At about 6 p.m. on Wednesday, I met up with my friends Alice and Nick, and we began our walk to the Angel. There wasn’t any other way to get there — almost all of the streets had been closed. A few blocks into the Zona Rosa, a group of policemen checked my bag and took my umbrella away. (“They’re prohibited,” one officer explained.)
Once on Reforma, more officers checked our bags and waved them with metal detectors. We caught a few bits of the parade. It was a colorful, fun affair, showing Mexican history through the ages. Families lined up to watch perhaps three or four rows deep, but there was still plenty of room to stroll and people-watch.
At about 7 p.m., we arrived at the Sheraton Maria Isabel, where my friend Carlos had reserved a suite. (Interestingly, Los Tigres Del Norte were staying in the floor above ours — my friends Jonathan and Ale ran into them in the elevator.) We had chicharrones, jicama with lime juice, guacamole, tacos and tlacoyos. To drink, there was tequila and mescal, and Carlos’s famous homemade sangrita. A shocking amount of beer and bottled water lay in the bathtub, covered in ice. (Wish I would’ve gotten a picture of it, but I was in a non-picture-taking relaxed mode.)
For pretty much the rest of the night, we watched the festivities unfold from there — our ninth-floor hotel window. Part of me felt lame to be so far away from the gente, and some of us did escape every now and then to go watch the concerts up close. I really liked the hotel room, though — having a real bathroom, drinks and food at my disposal made the party just… comfortable. And all of my favorite people were with me.
At 11 p.m., all us — we numbered about 15 — yelled the grito together in the hotel room, following President Calderón’s lead on TV.
Vivan los heroes que nos daban patria!
Viva!
Viva Hidalgo!
Viva!
Viva Morelos!
Viva!
Viva Josefa Ortiz de Dominguez!
(me, thinking, “Who’s she?”) Viva!
There were a few more vivas, and then fireworks exploded outside. The Angel lit up with lights. Everyone stopped talking and stared, and took pictures. It was a special moment — here I was in Mexico, a country I loved and a place that’s given me so much over the past year. I took a moment just to be grateful.
Later, we had a dance party in the suite’s living room. (If you want to know how to get people dancing at a party, invite a Zumba instructor.) Crayton and I walked home at about 2 a.m., to the waning strains of the Tigres. Around us, women pushed babies in strollers, and little kids walked by in sparkly tri-colored hats and ribbons.
To my surprise and delight, a late-night food fair had been set up Calle Florencia. Vendors had pozole, pambazos, tacos, buñuelos and atole. It smelled amazing.
I bought an atole de masa even though I wasn’t hungry. It was Independence Day, I had to buy something!
Buñuelos for sale
Pan de nata was everywhere. Someone fill me in -- is this an independence day tradition?
We got to bed at 2:30 on Sept. 16, and were awakened at 8:55 a.m. by a neighbor with a noisemaker. The folks next door to us were still partying. (I’m telling you, there are some hardcore partyers in the Roma.)
Yesterday was a beautiful, sunny day, and Crayton and I had planned to get out of the house and maybe see the military parade. Instead I was hit with a stomach bug — I spent the whole day at home, eating rice porridge and sipping Gatorade, and watching old episodes of Deadwood. I don’t think it was the atole de masa that gave me the bug, by the way — I’ve been feeling a little strange since Tuesday.
Stomach problems aside, I still feel really lucky to have been a part of the party.
Now tell me what you did. How did you spend your Bicentenario?