For my happenin’ Friday night I went to the mall. Awwwww yeah. And I bought shoes. Stereotyyyyyyyyped.

La Plaza de las Americas is a giant, U.S. style, multi-layered cake of a mall, with a cineplex, cascading waterfalls and a billion teenagers. It was hoppin’ with la gente. I’m not sure if it’s always that busy on a Friday or if it was because tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day, apparently a big to-do here. There were noticeable flocks of people in the jewelry stores and store-islands of Valentine’s crap. Balloons are the big thing here rather than flowers and little “regalitos” (“little gifts” that are tiny, less than an inch tall thingamajigs that say cutesy lovey things) instead of chocolates. I imagine flowers would wilt and chocolates melt. Hard candies and sweet breads (real ones, not the gross kind) are the rage instead of chocolates anyways.

Notably there was not a single chocolateur in the behemoth mall, but there were like 15 shoe tienditas, no kidding. The standard shoe store layout is interesting–they have one of each shoe out on display, and ALL the shoes are on display, usually behind big plastic cases. You go in and eyeball which ones you like then tell the employee the shoe’s number that you want to try on. I’m sure I waved my gringa flag when asking to see the shoes I liked because their number was something like 56,789. I’ve gotten pretty good with numbers, but they’re such a mouthful I’m slow in speaking them. I mean seriously, “cincuenta y seis mil, setecientos ochenta y nueve.” Oh well.

I had dinner at one of the food courts (this place has 3!) at a local chain restaurant called “Something las Gordas.” The something is in script and I cannot fathom what it says. It looks like “fa’ca” but as far as I know that doesn’t make any sense. They were awesome, though, by far the best food deal I’ve had so far. I had fried plantains (the big ones) with crema and some kind of cheese, a gordita with potatoes and chorizo, and a glass of radtacular horchata and it cost 46 pesos = $3.20! It was soooo good and I couldn’t eat all my plantains. They have a poblano and corn gordita I can’t wait to try.

Like any mall, my evening affirmed my belief that all teenagers everywhere in the universe are the same.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Veracruz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.