Couch Shopping

Our first major purchase for the apartment was a couch. I was set on an L-shaped couch because, honestly, I think the comfort that comes from the L puts all regular couches to shame.

We found a couch while my parents were still here, and went back to buy it. I had read a bad review online saying that the store says they will deliver purchases within 2 weeks but often don’t for more than a month. I didn’t believe it since people tend to use the internet to rant, but sure enough we got to the store and a customer was angry because after a month they still hadn’t seen their furniture. We were already at the register, but we ran out of that store as fast as possible.

We had spent time before checking out all the major department stores, but everything was either way to expensive or way to ugly. We had no idea where to find a couch, so Jose asked a man selling magazines on the street where we could find couches and he sent us to the perfect place.

A great thing about Mexico is that there are streets dedicated to selling just one thing. The shoe street, the camera street, the paper street. The magazine seller told us to walk until the end of the wedding dress street (oh how I wished I wasn’t yet married then) and we would find the couch street. Sure enough, suddenly every store was jam packed with couches.

The first stores were total rip offs. We realized that the farther we walked down the street, the cheaper the couches got and the shadier the area got. Before we knew it, salesmen were taking us across streets and around corners from one store to another. We went up homemade stairs, walked through second stories made of plywood that bowed and creaked, and ducked our heads under extremely low ceilings.

We spent a few hours looking at different stores and couches. Many couches were close to what we wanted, but not enough to buy. Many were the dark brown couch I was looking for, but they were all too expensive. Finally, we found an L-shaped green couch with lots of pillows. It is nothing like what I had in mind, but I love it. It looks great in our floral wallpaper living room and it gives us a comfortable place to watch movies. It is bigger and cheaper than the first couch we backed out of buying. It was even delivered just a few hours later.

Our shopping experience left us exhausted and hoping we’d never have to shop like that again. Being escorted from one store to the next, looking at hundreds of couches in such a short time, and talking with relentless salesmen was more than we could handle at once. It was overwhelming and kind of miserable, but it was a very Mexican way to shop, and at least we got a good couch out of it.

-Emma