So now I had temp power back on my laptop (ordered a new adapter on Amazon, had it shipped to our son Marc in Honolulu, who’s shipped it to us with some other stuff).  But I needed to figure out why we weren’t getting wi-fi any more in our room – we’d never had problems before, but heavy rains from the rainy season have kicked in.

In Mexico City, “stuff” for shopping is frequently clustered together, ie, plumbing shops will be clustered along several blocks, women’s shops will be clustered along several blocks, etc.  It’s actually fun to discover that ‘this block’ is student supplies (arts and crafts) and so on.

So I asked Nico (our great Casa house manager) where I should go to look for computer “stuff”.  He showed me on a map and off I went looking for that cluster, taking the great MetroBus system here in DF (Distrito Federal – the capital of Mexico; like Washington, District of Columbia – DC).

I got down in the general area and found lots of music shops, cell phone shops, but nothing that really looked like computer shops – until I was directed to #14 Republica del Salvador.  Jackpot!

But the entrance was, to put it politely, unspectacular – just a relatively narrow door for what I discovered inside.

When I walked in (and walked and walked), I discovered this “tunnel” or corridor of shops actually went from block to block (Salvador to Uruguay) and there were multiple tunnels on at least 3 floors.  The place is huge inside!

My simple goal was to look for a Range Extender – a device to capture the weak signal from the Casa’s router and act as an amplifier for our room.

But this wasn’t going to be so easy…

If you click on the image of the door for a bigger, more detailed look, you’ll see a man standing inside an empty stall (drinking a soda).  That’s generally the size of the stalls and maybe the stalls are about 10 feet deep at the most.  But there are ‘millions’ of these stalls in the complex and it seems each has a barker or two who call out to you (Amigo!) and want to hand you flyers, etc.

I quickly realized this wasn’t going to be like shopping at Best Buy.  I first needed to scope out the place, get my bearings, figure out how the shops were ‘clustered’ (if at all).

I’m pretty good with my mental GPS but it didn’t take long before I was dis-oriented.  All the shops looked alike – but the place was fascinating.  I further discovered that other corridors went out into a third street (Central) which further complicated my orientation.

Ultimately, it took a couple of trips down there but I found a TP-Link brand range extender that I set up this 4th of July weekend and it works great – we’re back in business again!