El Mercado Libertad "San Juan de Dios" is quite the experience. It is a three story public market spanning the length of three massive city blocks, where you can find anything you could possibly imagine. In our quick jaunt into its depths I saw; ceramics, belts, shoes (boots, heels, sandals, imitation nikes...), fruits, meats, strange toys, paintings, cheap electronics, rabbits, parakeets, puppies, exotic juices, neon lights and way more. Basically everything I would never purchase, well, except for the juices and some coconut meat which I devoured... Oh, that is a lie, I also picked up a pretty sweet as in piece of junk jump rope to assist in my urban workouts!

Thursday July 5th- Tonalá Jalisco. Only a five block walk from our hostel is the old San Fransisco church which is surrounded by horse drawn carts on one end, and a major bus stop on the other. As tempting as it was to hop in a poorly treated / over heated horses carriage we continued on in search of bus 231. For 6 pesos we caught a ride on a bald tired bus driven by an overly aggressive young driver with poor hygiene. I have ridden buses in many countries but due to the narrow streets and our drivers need for speed, I was on the edge of my seat for the duration of the 35 minute ride! The reason we headed to Tonalá was because on Thursdays all the artists come out and set up shop in the heart of the city. The streets were filled with thousands of tented booths displaying jewelery, paintings, ceramics, scrumptious local foods and then of course further down all the knock of clothing brands. I was surprised with the quality and ingenuity of the crafts in this town. After intense exploration Carli adroitly spotted a western stores entrance behind on of the tents. If you know either of us, then you know we like our boots, so naturally we were headed in! This little store had about 200 different boots on display as well as hand made leather belts with all sorts of neat embroidery. Above the boots, the walls were covered with phenomenal Mexican Wrangle shirts. The owner / super smooth salesman don Victor told us that in addition to what we saw he could easily have some boots custom made for us. He instructed us to pick out certain details of existing boots and patterns and then from there we could design our very own "botas hechas en Mexico", that would be ready within a week. I was originally going to go with brown square tips with a band of borrego (big horn sheep) but Victor said that although it is exotic, the Borrego doesn't have the best longevity, so I ended up with Bull hide! Carli went a little more exotic than I and will soon be sporting Boots with Cobra skin! In the end Victor is very content with the price we are paying, and we are beyond pleased with the total cost. So there you have it, a mutually beneficial exchange of goods!

We proudly stepped back into the lively streets in a state of euphoria from our exciting new purchase. We didn't buy anything of significance other than those boots and many tasty treats from the streets, but for the record, if I lived in Mexico, this is where I would come to load up on art and numerous house hold items!