So, one our last night here in Mexico, Darcy and I stumbled upon this street festival. I guess stumbled upon isn’t quite the right word. Every Saturday (throughout the day) a large vacant lot is transformed into a vast, endless marketplace of everything from souvenir trinkets to watermelons to boxers to silver jewelry and everything in between. It’s incredible and you can get lost in it for hours. Particularly impressive are the vast displays of counterfeit (and illegal) movies and CDs. They work fine, but often times don’t come with things like track lists. Major bummer. Still at $4 american or $50 pesos for 2, it’s a pretty good deal.
The view from the Saturday market
Anyways, so we wanted to walk back through this marketplace on our last night. After a visit to the bread lady (see here for the original post about her), we heard a lot of noise and decided to check out the nearby plaza to see if we could figure out what was going on. We did, and discovered a whole bunch.
Turns out, the small town of Santiago was host to some sort of small festival. We weren’t able to figure out what exactly they were celebrating, but it looked like tons of fun. Stands of carnival rides and games dotted the sidewalks and a large stage played host to radio station “K-alien-T” (pronounced “caliente” I assume) and whatever music they had planned.
Stage in Manzanillo
Then, there were the taco stands. So many bloody taco stands. No one, apparently, had learned the lesson of oversaturation of the market. Think back to any fair or convention you’ve been to. There’s always stands offering sandwiches, kettle corn, etc. Sometimes there are multiple stands. Yet, the same food sellers spread themselves out. In this case, there were LITERALLY ten taco stands, each proclaiming they sold the best tacos, within one block of each other. They all sold exactly the same types of tacos that looked to be cooked exactly the same. How an outsider was supposed to pick remains beyond me (we’d already eaten dinner).
Mixed in with all those taco stands was a drink table, some little trinket booths, the occasional carnival game and some dessert booths. As we walked around, the temptation was too much. We had to get something. That something ended up being a deep fried banana (I know, I know). Well, the banana was deep fried and then topped with butter, condensed milk and strawberry jam. It’s not something I would get often. No, once in a couple of years is fine. But, it was really good.
As we were about to leave, we started hearing this incredibly loud bass. Extremely loud. So we had to find it. Right in the middle of the street was a random car festival. They were showcasing the sound of this particular car, but there was also a model and professional photographer there to take pictures of the scene. You can see a bit of the scene in this brief video I shot.
After that, we bailed and headed back to the hotel, but the sounds of the concert lasted well on into the morning (I could hear the music clearly with earplugs in from our hotel, which is about 2 miles away).
Not Intent on Arriving 