Paseando

We have finished up most of our ministry duties for the year and are just wrapping up some loose ends before heading to the States for a holiday visit.  Today we headed up to town, paseando (walking around) and running some errands.  The fair starts today and aready the streets are jam-packed with vendors and snake oil salesmen. We saw three smooth talkers demonstrating their natural remedies, two of them with snakes as side kicks to spice up the presentation.  One guy was praising the intelligence of the Chinese and their knowledge of natural medicine, and looked up and saw us and said, "See, even the gringos want to learn about it!"  Then he went on to show pictures of surgical specimens,diabetic wounds, tumors and diseased livers--all of which could have benefited from his products.  The last guy had a similar sales presentation, but it was hard to understand his message.  When he got out his knife and started holding up his pet snake, we decided we didn't want to see how that ended.  We kept walking down the endless row of roscas (dry, toasty bread/cookie-type snack to eat with coffee), sacks of peanuts and chiles and barbecue grills and hair barrettes and shoes and snack bars and roscas and pirated movies (4 random movies on one DVD!) and roscas and tortilla baskets and crazy pizza and roscas and ..............You get the picture.  Thankfully, tomorrow we head out of town before traffic becomes impossible!