La Merced

After breakfast we took the metro to La Merced, the biggest market in Mexico city. It turns out that the metro stop is in fact right in the centre of the market so we walked straight out into the mass of stalls, mostly selling shoes in this location. The market really is huge with all sorts of stuff for sale...a notable exception is that there was no touristy craft market, the one thing we were looking for. We looked around the various sections, once again all the stalls selling the same stuff are located right next to each other. It took about 3 hours to look around the whole thing, and it is definitely the biggest indoor market we've seen although we are not sure if it's bigger than the 'Mercado Negra' in La Paz. Once we had looked round we decided we should try some of the home made chocolates which we had seen an hour or so before. This of course required us to find this area of the market again which proved to be substantially harder than it should. The place is a maze with no reference point from which to navigate around, added to that the paths are incredibly narrow and the unbelievably slow speed at which everyone walks means that it's really frustrating to try and go anywhere. It took almost an hour to find the stalls again where we had to buy a small box of chocolates because not one of the 100 or so sweet stalls sold them singly. By now we were exhausted and decided to get some market food, we went back to the centre of the market where we bought a bowl of soup, which was ok and two beef tacos which were amazing. After this we decided to go back to the hostel but this required us to find the metro station again, which since it was in the middle of the market you can't see from anywhere so we had to search around for another half an hour or so before we eventually found it. After getting back to the hostel we chilled out for a few hours, made another salad for dinner and tried to find somewhere to go dancing. We thought we had found somewhere to go which according to it's website had no cover, after getting ready and walking the mile or so to the club we got there to find everyone still standing outside even though it should already be open, we waited for about 20 mins before asking someone who informed us that contrary to what the internet said it's not free at all and cost $10 each to get in!! This is way beyond our budget and after looking around at the people queuing we decided that the chances of there actually being any dancing tonight were slim to none and gave up. We checked Mama Rumba's on the way back but found that to be equally expensive in addition to the fact that the dance floor had been covered in tables!! Slightly disappointed we went back to chill at the hostel for the evening and watched a couple of episodes of Heroes on the computer before bed.