Food supplies

One of the most important problems when living anywhere is the problem of where to get your food. In Colima the situation on this part is very easy. On pretty much any corner you can find an abarrotes shop, where they sell food and other things that you might need frequently.
Most of these abarrotes are family businisses and sell a reasonable choice of fruits and vegetables, that depends on the season. Oftenly they are pretty tightly integrated into the owners house/appartment.
We had an amazing food shop just on the corner to the main road. The selection of food was pretty great and the quality was amazing. Tomatos are really hard and really taste like tomato, not just of water. Changing with the season you can get Mangos, Tuna (the fruit of the Nopal cactus) and other goods. Melons are awesome and Avocados almost a reason to live in Mexico. There is hardly any food better than a nice Guacamole.

In addition you can find chicken and other (=beef) butchers, and for example the yoghurt shop.
The yoghurt shop sells yoghurt and other dairy products. With us it got it's name for the selection of awesome yoghurts made with real fruits. The owners are nice and when I went there in the morning they would greet me with my name after their kid had asked my a ton of times ¿Cómo te llamas?. When I left, I gave them a photo of the volcano and got a Tequila glass in exchange. :)

For lunch a lot of Cantinas or Tecarias offer their service. Here a mom cooks for her guests - usually in the front room of her house.
Just over the street from our office, Carmen offered her service. Everyday we got a great lunch (well, the selection for vegetarians is quite limited, but she does what is possible in Mexico) with the agua of the day. You can take a wide variety of fruits and vegetables and blend it with a bit of lime, sugar and water. The selection includes guayaba, cucumber, mango, mellon (both, yellow and red), just lime, Jamaica (not the island but the flowers of the hibiscus plant), rice, and a lot of other things where sometimes we did not know what it was.

Then, there is Tacos Orientales, also known as The Hangar. In a hangar style building you can order the most amazing ration of greasy meat, you can imagine. One ration of Sabores (sabor=taste) costs about MX$55 (they just raised the price a while ago) and seriously gets me to the limits of what I can eat, especially since - like everywhere in Mexico - you can get an unlimited number of tortillas with your food, which are slightly greasy in themselves. For vegetarians this place is rather difficult, since even if you order the vegetarian ration explicitely without meat you can sometimes find enough for a pretty big Taco (thanks, Andrea! ;) ). Well, there still are Quesadillas (cheese filled tacos).

Spicyness of the food is no real problem in Mexico since it usually is not the food itself, but the salsa (sauce) which decides upon the spicyness. So if you don't want spicy food, you can just leave out the salsa and if you don't order the awesome Chiles rellenos (chili stuffed with rice and/or meat and/or cheese, and then covered in egg) you can have a not very spicy dish. This at some point of time can be very important because a lot of stomaches at some pint of time decide that they have seen enough chili and get seriously upset. On the other hand, chili has a desinfecting effect and thus is very nice on streetfood (dangerous but oftenly really yum and cheap).