Dónde esta el supermercado?

November 14, 2018

Ejido Monterrey to erm... Ejido Monterrey

We woke up early but didn't get going from the hotel until around eleven. That was because we had to have a rematch in Eureka Ball, although don't worry, there won't be a long description of how every point went again, because I'm sure it's not that interesting to you and also because Dea won. Then we needed to find out where we could buy our groceries. We had been banking on there being a store of some kind in town, and we approached the Spanish-speaking hotel woman with our phrase of the day, "Dónde esta el supermercado?"

Unfortunately, it seemed that the supermarket in this town had, like almost everything else, closed its doors. But an American hunter who was also staying in the hotel when he wasn't shooting pheasants came to our aid and told us that there was a supermarket in the next town over. It was to the east of us and we wanted to be going west, but it didn't look too far and we figured we'd get there pretty quick on the highway which had a good shoulder. We'd just nip there and back super fast and then get on with our planned day riding westwards.

We blasted down the highway in no time, but the road from the highway into the town had no shoulder and was busy, so we made a slightly longer route into town on some back roads. We then rode into town where we saw lots of restaurants open, including one selling pizza, but we held our nerve and used our phrase of the day to stick to the plan and find the supermarket.

It was a real supermarket too, and we spent quite a long time shopping, as is often the way when shopping for the first time in a new country. We also needed to figure out what to do about our water situation, as it's not a good idea to be drinking the tap water in Mexico. As we pondered about this a very friendly man with excellent English asked if we needed help. Ramon was, as I already mentioned, a very friendly man, and he showed us to a drinking water dispenser at the front of the shop. Ordinarily people use it to fill up five gallon plastic jugs, but Ramon managed to swing it so that we could fill up our collection of smaller water bottles. Very friendly man, that Ramon, as I think I mentioned.

By the time we finally finished shopping we had worked up quite an appetite, and decided we really should check out the pizza place. We were really glad we did too, because it was really very cheap, just 40 pesos ($2 US) for an individual pizza. I asked the woman in my rapidly improving Spanish for two vegetarian pizzas and we sat down to wait.
"I'm really impressed by your Spanish, Chris," Dea said. "You're really good."
Fifteen minutes later, and two of these arrived at our table:

Yeah, I need to work on my pronunciation of 'vegetarian' because apparently it sounds a lot like 'pepperoni' when I say it.

I tried again at ordering a vegetarian pizza, this time with the more reliable method of pointing at the vegetarian pizza on the menu. While I waited, Dea went ahead and ate one of the pepperoni pizzas. I thought it would be a great idea to take a photo of her doing so, because she did such a good job of demonstrating how to eat tacos yesterday, I thought today she could demonstrate how to eat pizza:

After a while a vegetarian pizza did arrive for me. Truly very delicious it was too. Dea now thought it would be a good idea for me to demonstrate my way of eating pizza, and took the following series of photos, for your viewing pleasure:

Anyway, I start to think this blog about cycle touring has gone a bit off track. So, after the pizza we decided we should do a bit of cycling. However, the shopping and the pizza eating had taken such a long time that we had by now decided that all we could really manage to cycle west would be enough to get us back to Ejido Monterrey and the lovely Hotel Celeste. I realise we are not covering ourselves in glory here, but I make no apologies for it. Santos in Brazil might be starting to sound like a long way off, but just think of how many more photos demonstrating how to eat things we'll be able to get through before we make it there!

So we started to ride back, but this time we avoided the highway altogether and went a bit further north to ride back along the same canal that we'd entered Monterrey from the first time around. It made for some good cycling, a nice relaxed ride to round off a pretty relaxed day, apart from the pesky dogs that continued to provide the soundtrack to rural Mexico.

If this dog is called anything other than Psycho it has been misnamed

I tried shouting "Callamas!" at the dogs to get them to shut up. It didn't work! Then Dea told me it was "Cállate!" Which also didn't work.

Retracing our route gave us a chance to check on the progress of the spring onion harvest. It's a big job!

We made it back to the hotel and I successfully asked if we could stay another night, once again impressing Dea with my Spanish. We then got in one more quick game of Eureka Ball, again there's no time to explain how Dea won, before settling into our hotel room for one more night. Three days into our Mexican adventure and we are approximately fifteen kilometres south of the United States border, as the egret flies. Things are going superbly well, I'd say.

Today's ride: 21 km (13 miles)
Total: 64 km (40 miles)

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