Locations

Locations

Avenida Arboledas and Calle Nuez
Adventure

My son and I live for adventures. Sometimes he’ll be playing a video game in his underwear and I’ll tell him, “Let’s go.” He asks where we are going and I tell him that I don’t really know. Out of the chair he bounds and is dressed in 5 minutes. (This surprises me because it usually takes him 20 minutes to get dressed to go to school.) And out the door we go.

Yesterday, he and I bounded out the door when Crystal sent us on a do-or-die mission to find cupcake papers. As it goes, it’s pretty hard to find those little cupcake paper holders down here. They are the little paper cups that cupcakes come in that you peel off before you eat the cupcake. In the US, they’re a “piece of cake” to find and buy, but here in Guadalajara, where to find those little guys is a bit of a puzzle. So out the door we go. We’re on a mission.

We have already been to the supermarkets where one would think to go first, but, like I said, it just ain't that easy. The major market chains don’t carry them. That’s why it had become a bit of a puzzle for us. We already exhausted most of the stores we knew of, and were continuingly being thwarted everywhere else we went. We wound up having to go to the wholesale market area. It’s called the Mercado de Abastos. It is where Mom and I went when she was looking for the saffron. It is a huge, open-market area in the middle of Guadalajara and covers about 4 or 5 square miles. (Mom loved it there. It reminded her of a beehive.) Everything sold down there is wholesale, in bulk, and you haul it away. Fruits, vegetables, candy, grains, beans, pet food, cleaning solutions, paper and plastic disposables, tires, you name it… it is sold in this area. Surely there must be little paper cupcake holders...

Traffic in the Mercado de Abastos is a remarkable experience, and also it is a remarkable pain in the butt. It reminded Mom of a beehive, remember? Semi trucks and VW bugs all alike all vie for the same street. Bicycles, pedestrians, and working men pushing hand-trucks over-laden with products criss-cross and jaywalk everywhere! Street lights and stop signs are really more suggestions than regulations unless the traffic cops are patrolling the area. But the traffic cops don’t help much. In my experience, all the traffic cops have ever done is snarl up traffic even more with their constant whining and complaining and demanding that everybody follow the “rules.” They slow things down and make people wait. Traffic backs up and intersections get gridlocked. And yesterday, the cops were all over the place. And it was a Saturday. And on Saturday at noon, it’s craziness in the Mercado de Abastos. It’s absolute madness. It is chaos.

And Patrick and I are off together on another adventure. We had a great time. We came home victorious with the little red paper cupcake holders and Crystal was very pleased with our efforts.