All kinds of stores here in Coatepec catch my fancy: stores that make plastic stuff hard to resist: clever containers and full dining room sets and baskets and buckets and dishes; panaderías where you can wander down the aisles with your tray and tongs and pick out one bolillo and one pombazo and one cookie and one donut and one pan dulce and a roll stuffed with ham and cheese and long floppy loaves of pan frances; cheap shoe stores, walls glittering with rhinestone-studded and gold sandals or somber with serious school shoes; bookstores with old and new side by side, hardware stores with even wheelbarrows hanging from the ceiling,leather good stores with boots and belts and hats and saddles, often made by the owner. There are shirt and dress stores with the goods hanging outdoors on hangers and flapping in the wind, coffee stores and butcher shops, and of course the endlessly satisfying papelerias with their collections of art supplies and notebooks and bundled sticks and accordian-folding paper toys and paper bags and wrapping paper and all sorts and glitter and glue to paste on everything.
My current favorite store lives in a high-ceiling whitewashed building next to the local Banamex. I don't know its name although it probably appears somewhere amidst the drawings on the front walls which merge with a bit of graffiti.
The front door with toy carts hanging
A wall between two windows. Collares are necklaces.
A window filled with bandanas and junk jewelry and who knows what else.
Inside the store, you can find a fairly expensive terra cotta fountain amidst a displa of bows on barrettes.
Shoes cover a window. And sombreros on the floor.
Cartoonish statues of La Virgen and a Saint on a horse whose name I've forgotten and talking cars.
Blankets and socks
Hammered tin religious pictures and a happy frog.
Cows and kitchen ware
A rainbow of bras.
A terra cotta nymph next to a table of jumping jacks and fake flowers.
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