• stacked soda bottles, luminescently red or orange inside
• deep green blades of spring onions heaped on a red sheet of plastic
• rusty red chicken bodies roasting on a grill
• clear-plastic bottles of yellow safflower oil
• yellow bananas with black bruise-spots
• Volkswagen-beetle taxis painted green and white, with square, purple information boxes on white doors
• yellow and orange plastic tarpaulins over sidewalks
• orange carrots in gray-brown wooden crates
• green and orange papayas on a table below a red tarpaulin
• orange squash blossoms bound with green grass blades
• green and yellow watermelons, one cut open shockingly red and wet inside, glistening in the sunlight
• burgundy hued mangos
• yellow and white blocks of cheese stacked on shelves
• rusty red links of sausage draped on a black wire
• half a pig, flesh red with white fat, on hooks
• pale orange tostadas in clear plastic bags
• inside the Merced, hundreds of piņatas of every color suspended from timbers above the stalls
• a dayglow-orange sign with black hand-lettering reading Macizo de Res 18 kg
• skin tones of naked women on magazine covers at street-corner kiosks, the eye irresistibly drawn to black pubic hair
• red blanket beneath dozens of rainbow-colored trinkets from Oaxaca
• three-foot-tall clear-plastic bags of yellow-orange cheese curls stacked seven feet high
• inside a semi-truck's cargo area, its back doors open, shiny red, white, and blue aluminum cans of Pepsi Cola stacked to the ceiling
• dozens of crates of blood-red tomatoes along sidewalk

10:00 AM

At 10:00 I shift to nose-walking; I go to the middle of the cavernous, new, modern-looking, mostly empty Plaza Comercial, standing next to the main Merced building. Here the odor of bare concrete and steel mingles with echoic house-sparrow chirps from high in the metal rafters. Now I walk sniffing toward the main Merced building, and this is what comes to me:

• the slightly stinging odor of sudsy detergent where a woman mops the concrete floor in front of her comedor, or eating stall
• wool, at a stall specializing in hand-woven sweaters
• coffee, from a white styrofoam cup on a counter
• the fresh-ironed odor around a stall selling T-shirts that on their fronts boldly proclaim "Innovation Sportswear Fasteners"
• truck exhaust fumes, odor of oil, someone's cigarette
• dried peppers in four-foot-high open bags, the dust burning my eyes
• toasted corn
• more dusty, dried peppers, this time as I pass, the odor gradually fusing with the moist, green smell of a four-foot-high stack of head lettuce
• over-ripe bananas
• basil, as a woman walks by carrying an armload of herbs
• leather, around a stall selling sandals
• greasy odor of twenty plucked chickens on two rotating spits inside the shining aluminum hood of a comedor's big rotisserie, the chicken bodies wet-looking and dripping
• mellow, simmering stews richly spiced with cilantro, or coriander, from comedores preparing for the lunch rush
• the general odor of vegetables, like V-8 Juice, especially celery
• garlic in two-foot-high wicker canisters; I smell the garlic and the wicker wood itself
• the dusty odor of white, bound-together corn shucks stacked in silolike mounds twenty feet high
• crushed-herbage odor of stripped and folded banana leaves
• ripe mangos
• granola, mostly the odor of honey and shredded coconut
• charcoal smoke from comedores on the Merced's south side
• roasting pig and frying onions
• urine around the metro entrance
• the odor of plastic where red, yellow, and white plastic buckets are stacked along the sidewalk
• the odor of boiled potatoes, but here no one boils potatoes... ; oh, it's glistening chicken bodies again, rotating wet and glistening inside a big rotisserie; maybe my nose is getting tired; time to end...