Stopping at the Nuns' House

On Saturday Alejandro and I went furniture shopping.  I was looking for a small shelf or credenza in black to go under the mirror in the living room... something simple and modern to go with the other furniture in that part of the room.  We headed to República de Paraguay Street located in the neighborhood of the Lagunilla Market.  As with so many of the streets of the historic center of the city, each avenue is largely devoted to one kind of store.  In the case of República de Paraguay it is furniture stores.  We went first to a store called "El Mueble Perfecto" where Alejandro's family has bought a number of pieces of furniture.  The salesman went through the entire store with us, but there was nothing similar to what I wanted.  We continued down the street and visited several more shops, but we had no luck there either.  We finally gave up on the furniture stores, and I decided that I would need to have it custom made at a workshop in the future.

We then headed south along República de Chile Street.  Here the theme was shops selling wedding dresses and gowns for girls' "quinceañera" (fifteenth birthday) parties.  The wedding dresses were generally in good taste, but the windows of shop after shop were filled with the most hideously garish "quinceañera" gowns you could imagine.  

After several blocks of dress stores, we came to a coffee shop, and we decided to stop, take a break and have something to drink.  The coffee shop was in the courtyard of what appeared to be a very old building that reeked of antiquity, from its rough stone walls to its heavy wooden beams. 

I asked our waitress how old the building was.  She didn't know, but she said that in colonial times it used to be a house for nuns.  When we left the café, I saw this plaque which said that "in this house was the first Carmelite convent around 1610."

I'm not sure that this building actually dates back to 1610.  In 1629 Mexico City was largely destroyed by a catastrophic flood, and the city was rebuilt.  However, I would not be surprised if it does go back to sometime in the 17th century after the flood.

Although I did not find the piece of furniture that I wanted, our shopping expedition was not entirely fruitless.  After leaving the coffee shop, the next street was Donceles, which specializes in camera stores.  I was in need of a new camera bag, and I found one in the first shop that we entered.