We bought ... now we shop

Well the house is now ours. So while there is heavy duty construction going on at the Casita we .. sorry, actually Sandie decided we should go shopping. Although we wouldn't be ready for anything like tiles, or sinks or anything really for 6 months at least it was nice to take a break from grey concrete and look at something a little prettier. So we jumped on the bus and headed up to the Sharks Den. A great place in the Gold Zone where we had shopped before. They have everything you want, many of the beach vendors buy from Guadalupe and her son Gustavo so we knew we could find what we wanted there. And what we wanted were a couple of Talavera sinks for the bathrooms and a couple of light covers for the outside lights on our decks. And tiles to go along with the sinks. The house is over 100 years old and we wanted it to look like an old Mexican style home with all the modern amenities in it. As we would learn from our contractor over the months that meant we wanted "Rustico" or as nearly as I could translate, nothing will ever be square in the house, or smooth, or fit together right so don't worry about it, "It's rustico!" Well we weren't disappointed. The number of light covers was overwhelming as you can see. We ended up choosing 3 nice size ones.

And the sinks were crazy. They had them all over the walls, the floor and in the back room. They had big ones, smaller ones, round ones, oval, square, modern designs, fish designs ... just about anything you could think of. You wander around the place being very careful not to knock anything over, believe me there isn't a lot of room so you have to be very careful. Then you pick out what you want. Gustavo goes and gets an extension ladder and deftly gets it past everything without hitting something then climbs up and brings down what you had asked to look at. We picked out two that we thought would go well in our new house.

Then we had to find tiles to match. That was a job. Think of hundreds of colours and styles and patterns and then for you folks that know Sandie and I,to actually agree on the tiles we like. We did eventually manage to find a couple that we thought would match the sinks.

Then you get everything together and start negotiating. That takes quite a while. Gustavo starts really high, we remind him we are regular customers, he comes down a bit. We tell him "aqui vivo ey Mazatlan no soy touristo" or I live in Mazatlan I am not a tourist, he drops his price a little more. I ask for my seniors discount and remind him we'll be back for more things, he comes down a bit more. We shake hands and have a deal. He wraps them up and we take them home. Unfortunatly we don't have finished walls yet, or counters to put the sinks in, or paint picked out, or any plumbing but we have a crazy vision what is under all the dirt and rubble and now we have something pretty to look at instead of just grey walls.