Various April Outings

My blog entries for a while have tended to detail excursions outside of Mexico City, however this month I have not ventured outside the city again. Instead, I have undertaken a variety of outings in the city itself, and got to know a lot more of the place than I did before. Here I will break down a few of the most interesting expeditions, and hopefully give my beloved readers an idea of the enormous variety this metropolis boasts.

PLAZA GARIBALDI

Ah, Plaza Garibaldi. Anyone who has looked twice at their $40 Lonely Planet guide to Mexico will have seen the place marked as one of the highlights of Mexico City. A strange bastion of mariachi music in a corner of the city so seedy not even a bird will touch it, I enjoyed this quirky excursion a lot.

One Saturday evening early in April, a Japanese friend and I decided to visit the venerated plaza and see what all the fuss was about. The place is easily accessible by metro, and we arrived around 6pm. To be honest, arriving so early was a slight error of judgement. At that early time of night, the square was less a lively centre of traditional Mexican music and more a sad block of pavement that looked like Chernobyl in 1986.

Still, my friend and I had a look around and had dinner while things slowly picked up.

One of the main things to do at the plaza is to visit the Tequila Museum, so you can learn in detail about the substance you'll be poisoning yourself with later on. With a series of panels taking you through the production process, and a long shelf full of specimen bottles, it's actually a pretty cool museum which is worth the few pesos it costs. At the end, a twenty-something explained to us the 'correct' way to drink tequila, the general idea being that you swish the liquid around in your mouth before swallowing, so as not to give your throat a stroke. Then, once the actual swallowing of the concoction is done, you suck on a lemon in order to supplant the unpleasant aftertaste of the tequila with the unpleasant aftertaste of of a highly acidic citrus fruit.

After leaving the museum, we had to decide which night-time establishment to pop into. It wasn't long before we were ambushed by a lively but somewhat unrelenting plaza-wanderer, whose job it was to convince visitors to enter one of Garibaldi's bars or restaurants. Of particular interest to the man was the idea that we would enter the nearby strip club, a proposition he made various times and in various ways, with a rather unapologetic prurience, until eventually we gave in and accepted. He led us up a dimly lit flight of stairs, which made me briefly wonder whether I had at some point been teleported into a David Lynch film, and we emerged in an even dimmer-lit open area which was completely empty except for us. We took a seat and opened up the drinks menu, and nearly had a heart-attack. We would have dropped our drink if we'd bought one; prices in the 300-400 dollar range littered the menu, which for me is roughly a month's living money. Just as a rather crestfallen looking temptress began to shuffle over to us, we stood up and resolved to leave immediately.

We headed downstairs and entered the main bar, which doubled as a venue for traditional Mexican dance and singing. This area projected a decidedly better vibe, and we promptly ordered a Corona. Remaining for well over an hour, we slowly imbibed our ethanol, and watched as a chubby forty-something in a green suit danced around singing old Mexican love tunes.

Eventually it was time to go; the later you stay in Plaza Garibaldi, the higher chance you have of being thrown up on. Venturing back out into the warm night, we located the metro, and returned home.

ZOO

Mexico City is home to a rather impressive zoo, which houses an extensive range of creatures from all over the world. I had been wanting to go for months, and finally got around to it. Upon arriving, I was surprised to discover that entry to the animal park was completely free - I guess president Peña Nieto has a soft spot for antelopes. However, inside the zoo, there were two areas that I had to pay to gain entry to, and these were the butterfly sanctuary and the reptile room.

Indeed, they had butterflies! I was overjoyed to see this, since I had completely missed out on the big butterfly sanctuary in Michoacán. Barely able to contain my excitement, I handed the desk-manners a fifty peso bill with a trembling hand, and ebulliently pranced into the haven of lepidoptera. Although it was very, very hot inside, I was just happy to finally see the winged creatures. Caterpillars also made an appearance, adorning the plants like Christmas tree decorations, zealously gobbling down the very leaves they were perched upon.

It was a magical experience.

I pressed on, exploring the rest of the zoo. There were birds, bears, wolves, deer, hippopotamus, giraffes, antelopes, and much more.

And here are some pictures from the reptile room.

A very fine range of beasts indeed. And with several species of animal native to Mexico, the zoo left me with a better idea of the fauna of the country I'm in. Previously, I had reached the conclusion that 98 per cent of the animals in Mexico were squirrels and dogs. No more.

Oh and as a bonus, here are a few pictures from a trip to the aquarium, which I undertook the following weekend!

Damn I love fish.


PARQUE BATÁN


The last April outing I'm mentioning in this blog seems almost hilariously trivial - basically, I went to a local park. But hear me out, hear me out.

I had known about this park for a while. It's located right next to the main highway about ten minutes south of where I live, and on the odd occasion I've walked down that way, I've noticed said park. But I always neglected it. I snubbed it. I basically pulled a metaphorical middle finger at it, dismissing it as not worthy of my time. Well, one afternoon, I wanted an easy outing close to home, and realised that Parque Batán was the perfect answer.

Upon arriving, I was met with a rather droll scene: it turned out that today, it was 'Children's Day' at the park. Thus, the park boasted a range of spectacles of appeal to little-uns. But first, I had to pay for a ticket to get in. So I joined the relatively long line of twenty and thirty-something parents with their spawn, and made a rather amusing contrast to it. Certainly I received a few quizzical glances - as a twenty year old student on his own, I didn't exactly fit the target demographic of a twenty-seven year old Mexican couple with a couple of toddlers. Nevertheless, I braved out the swathe of staring four year olds, and eventually got my prized ticket, which cost less than two dollars. I clarified of course that I was only there to look around the park, in case they were wondering whether I planned to jump up and down in the bouncy castle with the three year olds.

Basically, it was just a nice park. I reconnoitered the site, and was overwhelmed by its niceness and innocence. Up north, drug cartels are chopping off heads and throwing police officers into snake pits. Here, five year olds were laughing mirthfully at fake dinosaurs, and prancing around inflatable castles. Parque Batán was a world of its own - a world wherein nuclear families, rather than nuclear arms deals, were the order of the day.

There were even turtles there!

Parque Batán was a nice foray into an important side of Mexico - young families doing young family stuff. Sure, I might have stuck out like a sore thumb, but I was glad to have gone when I did. Some of the best gems lie right around the corner. Well, if you live near a jeweler at least.

Cancún

All right fellas, this is going be a long post, because I'm going to detail the events of an ENTIRE WEEK of action. The place of the action was Cancún, and the occasion for making a week of it was Semana Santa, a holiday which these days seems to be less about the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, and more about the death and resurrection of you, sprawled across the floor of a nightclub bathroom.

Without wasting any more of your time on cute expository material, let me dive right into the week during which I went through more than a whole bottle of sun screen, spent the equivalent of a trust fund baby's inheritance on taxis, turned twenty, lost my second cell phone, and got sick for the first time in Mexico.

DAY ONE: GETTING TO CANCÚN

You all know by now how much I love pain-stakingly detailing how I got somewhere. Unfortunately I can't spare you from it this time, since it literally took the entire day. Two hours of that were actually spent in the plane. The rest was mostly me engaging in complex travel arrangements to reduce the cost of transportation to an absolute minimum.

I had resolved to get to the Mexico City airport not by taxi but by metro, a decision I was favourably disposed to make, since I had only a backpack with me. It was also during the daytime, so I didn't have the common night-time metro fear of being hacked apart by some twenty-nine year old heroine addict with an axe. I left the house at 9:30am, walked forty minutes to the metro, then spent a further forty minutes on the metro, during which I had to change line twice. The upside? It cost me five pesos to get to the airport, instead of two hundred.

My flight to Cancún left at 1:30, which is quite possibly the best time a flight can leave. When I got onto the plane, I was surprised to discover I was in the Aero-México equivalent of first class. No wonder my ticket cost so damned much! You get far more leg space, can drink out of an actual glass, and can get off the plane before everyone else. Still, I'd rather have had a cheaper ticket.

When I touched down in Cancún airport, I swiftly dodged the sleazy taxi drivers plying for business, and headed straight for the bus, the least expensive way of getting from the airport into Cancún proper. The catch was, once I got into Cancún, I was at the bus terminal, an hour's walk from the house where we were all staying. Meh, I was up for a walk, as always. With the help of the instructions I had written out by hand before I left, and armed with my GPS, I made it eventually to our house, snapping a couple of pics on the way.

When I arrived at the house, only the two New Zealanders were there - but they had flown in the previous Thursday, so I felt like the first one to arrive. It soon became clear to me that people were not planning to eat out every night, as I had been doing for the previous three months. So I came to terms with the grim reality that I would have to go out to the store, buy some supplies, and cook for the first time ever in Mexico.

Yeah, I said it. Prior to Cancún, I had not cooked once in Mexico. The only heat I had generated was by expressing unpopular opinions on the internet. Nevertheless, I had no intention of cooking anything complicated - nothing which had a chance of being labelled 'succulent', 'complex' or some other similarly overused food adjective. I bought sausages, pasta, and tinned vegetables. But of course, even this turned out to be difficult, since the stove in the house was a gas stove, and I had had next to no experience with them. Hell, it took me the best part of five minutes to figure out you actually needed some kind of incendiary device to get the thing going. This is why science education is important kids.

Finally, one of the New Zealanders informed me that you needed to actually light the stove, and offered me a box of matches. They were the most pathetic, weedy little matches I had ever laid eyes upon. I bet they got picked on by all the other matches at the match factory. Anyway, they were so weak and useless, I actually had to place my finger on the head to get enough pressure on it for it to light, without the stick snapping. This inevitably resulted in me burning myself, and requiring a few subsequent attempts to experience success with the damned things. The result was a pretty vapid three-piece meal whose only real value was making an anecdote for this blog.

Later on, more people started to arrive. Two Dutch and two Mexicans, to be precise.

DAY TWO: AND SO IT BEGINS...

Day two was a perfect microcosm of the entire week, since the two main events were going to the beach, and hitting a nightclub. Many more people arrived that day - two Swedes, two more Dutch, another couple of Mexicans, and a Swiss guy. We all went to the public beach in the centre of Cancún, about the only time on the whole trip we were all together. I've got to admit, there is a reason why giant swathes of American spring-breakers and Mexican spring-breakers alike flock to Cancún - the beaches are far superior to most others. The sand is white, and it's actually sand, instead of that stony, shelly crap you get at so many other beaches across the world. Apparently it's a crime to take sand from the beach, so precious is the stuff. Though if you can  pay off the cops for just about everything else, I don't imagine they'd get all moral on you over sand.

 We stayed at the beach for a long time, until early evening in fact. Then it was time to go home, eat dinner, and get spruced up, before heading out to one of the city's most popular nightclubs.

The nightclub in question is called 'The City', which is quite an apt name, since the number of people inside the club was enough to populate one. It has the reputation of being the biggest club in Latin America, which prepared me somewhat for its three floors, enormous main dancing area, and my almost complete inability to move anywhere. Personally I liked the club though - the DJs, charmingly called the 'Chainsmokers', actually put on some good beats, and we had our own table, supplied with alcohol, and soft drinks to make the alcohol palatable.

I drank a little too much, something which was probably responsible for me allowing some guy to take 200 pesos from me in tips for a single drink, approximately my daily budget here in Mexico. I was miffed, but learned my lesson. When I had finally had enough of dancing, which I had been doing alone, I returned to our group's table, only to find that no one was there. Nor did anyone respond to my whatsapp messages, leading me to resolve to return home alone. I found a taxi driver who wasn't a complete con-artist, and headed off at around 4am. While in the taxi, the taxi driver gave a long and detailed description of a strip club I might be interested in, and handed me the corresponding flyer. Well, I never got to that strip club in the end. But what a nice gesture.

DAY THREE: SOLITUDE AND THE GREAT WALK

I apologise if the title of this chapter sounds less like a summary of my third day and more like the name of an edgy alt-rock band led by a female singer who wears a bright yellow dress. Due to my late bedtime last night, or rather last morning, I didn't get up until midday. I decided to head off to the beach again with three of the Mexicans, commencing what was an unusual day.

We arrived at the same public beach we had visited the day before, and from there undertook about an hour long walk to reach some other unspecified beach, whose existence remains dubious, but which I suppose was the hope of our generation and all that. Eventually we gave up, and the Mexicans were keen to check into some hotel to splay out for the afternoon. But it was a pricy proposal, and I didn't want to pay that price. So I graciously bowed out and went off on my own.

First I swam for about an hour, watching my backpack, which I had necessarily left on the shore, like a hawk. Then I made the slightly crazy but at-the-time-appealing-to-me decision to walk home. To give you an idea of the distance, it took us around half an hour to get to the beach by bus, not to mentioning the subsequent walking we had undertaken. Yep, I calculated that to get home on foot, it would take just over three hours. Eh, I had the time, and for some reason was extremely enthusiastic to undertake the journey. All I needed was my GPS, the rest of my water, a chocolate bar, and a bag of skittles. So without hesitation, I set off on my adventure.

Near the beach we ended up at

Nice resting spot on my journey back

A brief anecdote - on my walk home, I saw a dead guy in a river, being attended to by a team of medical people. If he wasn't dead, he certainly wasn't very alive at that point. I wonder what became of him.

When I finally got home after three hours of walking, I was completely done. My legs and feet ached like a German expressing surprise, and when I discovered that there was nothing in the house to light the stove for my dinner with, it was with the utmost lugubriousness that I trudged to the local shop to buy matches. Surprise surprise, my dinner was sausages, pasta and vegetables again. Though at least this time I went to the trouble of cooking my own vegetables. One guy at the house commented to me how funny it was that I was so willing to walk three hours home, and yet I was so unwilling to cook a meal. I hadn't thought of it that way before, but fair enough.

I was so hungry from the walk that even after eating a large dinner, I further consumed two bananas, a packet of biscuits, and a bowl of cereal. But it felt good to have done all that exercise. I wouldn't trade it for the world (nawwwwwwww).

DAY FOUR: ISLA MUJERES, DISAPPOINTMENT, AND DADDY O

Deciphering this chapter title without context is likely to be the reason for some Oxford linguistics prof's suicide.

For day four, we had a day trip to Isla Mujeres lined up. Isla Mujeres is a large island just off the coast of Cancún, which makes it a sickeningly obvious choice for a day-trip. We had signed up to do the trip with Xcape, an organisation that very obviously caters to a younger crowd like ourselves. To pre-empt my story, most of us were very disappointed with the trip, which was at best a joke, and at worst a bad joke.

The only 'jolly' thing on the tour

Oh, that morning I lost my cell phone. Shortly after getting out of the taxi which took us to the hotel where the meeting point for the trip was, I realised I didn't have my phone on me. This would have been no more than five to ten minutes after getting out of the cab. Still, when we called the number of the taxi, the driver claimed he couldn't find anything in the car, a statement I am almost certain was a complete lie. Unfortunately, taxi drivers in Mexico in general, but Cancún in particular, are what we Mexican-Spanish speakers like to call 'súper mala onda', which loosely translates as complete and utter douchebags. The kicker was that I had only just bought the phone two weeks previously, after losing my first phone in an Uber. Two cell phones lost in vehicles within the space of a month. Good job Thomas!

Anyway, this trip to Isla Mujeres was in a giant boat, with squillions of other young Cancún visitors like ourselves. On the way over, we snorkeled for a while, my first time doing that activity in over a decade. Though I mentioned that the trip was very disappointing, the snorkeling, and the consequent seeing of fishies, was its one saving grace.

Why was the trip such an abjectly abhorrent outrage? When we finally got to the damned island, the tour organisers told us we had forty minutes to get off the boat and explore the island. Let me say that again, in case you didn't catch it. Forty minutes. Forty minutes?!! Forty minutes is the amount of time it takes you to watch one episode of some crappy show on Netflix, not the amount of time it takes to meaningfully explore an island! Oh, and did I neglect to mention that this forty minutes included eating lunch on the boat too? So by the time you finished nourishing yourself, you had at best twenty-five minutes to explore the island. Twenty-five. Are you freaking kidding me? I take twenty-five minutes to decide on a pair of socks to wear in the morning. The whole trip was an absolute farce, and a farce we refused to submit to, so we scoffed our faces on the boat, then ditched the tour.

We headed to a beach on Isla Mujeres and relaxed there for the rest of the afternoon. The water was very shallow, like the Miss Universe competition, but it was also very warm, and brought us much joy. A few girls from our group made the rather unusual request that they been interred in a sarcophagus of sand, a request which I eventually surprised myself with by making as well.

Triple-headed horizontal sand monster

Eventually it was time to go home, so we headed to the boat dock and were met with a queue of a ridiculous length, much like a six-year old playing snooker. But we got back eventually.

The evening agenda was to go out to a club called 'Daddy O', supposedly the 'best club' in Latin America. But I was wary of superlatives after that night. Sure, it was a decent joint. The dance floor was somewhat smaller than in The City, the drinks came slower, and the music was less creative, but it was an OK club. Hell, they were selling lollipops in the bathrooms, so I had to reserve some affection for it. But the BEST club in the whole of one-and-something continents? No. When I left the club, I made the mistake of buying an overpriced and disgusting pizza from some guy on the street. It was so repulsive I gave a quarter of it away to people who didn't even really want it. Luckily I ran into a couple of the Dutch guys and caught a cab home with them, decreasing the amount of money I had to shell out to the criminally extortionate taxi drivers.

And that's all I have to say about that.

DAY FIVE: TULÚM, CENOTE, PLAYA DEL CARMEN

Now today's trip was a trip worth doing, which is just as well, otherwise I might have throttled Xcape in their sleep. I had thought this trip was purely to Tulúm, which would have been fine in itself, since Tulúm is home to a fascinating and impressive ancient Mayan site near the sea. But I also discovered that the trip would take us to a cenote, one of many spectacular large freshwater pools spread out across the Yucatán Peninsular, as well to Playa del Carmen, a popular beach about an hour from Cancún.

Tulúm was my favourite thing from the whole week. Visually, the ruins are beautiful, and with a guide to provide some history on the site, it was a great excursion. I'll let the pictures do the talking here.

  

And here are a couple of requisite people-pictures.

The next stop was the cenote, whose name I have forgotten. From memory, it is one of the biggest, if not the biggest cenote in the country. It actually consists of several pools, rather than just being one giant one. I would have loved to swim, but my shoulders had been burnt badly the day before in Isla Mujeres, and I was too much of a wuss to stick out the pain of jumping in the water again so soon. But I watched vicariously from the sidelines, and took photos from all sorts of angles. It is definitely a natural wonder worth seeing.

The last stop was Playa del Carmen. I didn't take any pictures there, because while it was cool, it was just another beach. Finally we ate dinner - we had barely eaten all day - and we got back on the bus to go home at 7pm. Today was the best day of my week in Cancún, and it wasn't even in Cancún!

DAY SIX: TULÚM (AGAIN)

Admittedly, today was a little strange. We went back to Tulúm again, for some reason. It was cool though. When we arrived, we went to a seafood restaurant and split up into two groups, following the highly complicated pattern of girls and boys. I ate with the Mexican guys, and we ordered a giant platter of seafood, which was frankly delicious. Making an appearance on the platter, notably, was octopus. I was highly suspicious of it at first, shuddering at my experience of eating octopus from a tin some two months ago. But I was assured that when presented in this form, octopus was delicious, and as it turned out, it was. I couldn't get enough of the eight-legged bugger.

After that, we went to the beach. I wanted to see more cenotes, but literally nobody else was game. Why? I have no clue. The beach was nice enough though. It had the best waves I'd caught on holiday. We also met up with another group of acquaintances, a member of which was a girl from my house. Alas, we didn't have much time at Tulúm this second time, because we had another night out lined up, and needed to get home.

The bus thing was pure stupidity. We wanted to catch the 6 'o' clock, but when we arrived at the terminal to buy our tickets, the bus left. To the geniuses who left early, with an unfilled bus, congratulations. You're the worst business people ever. Then we tried for the 7 'o' clock. By the time we got to the ticket station, the tickets were sold out, despite the fact that we were told we had to wait until twenty minutes before the bus left to buy the tickets. That was very annoying. Finally we got the 8 'o' clock, after having spent two hours in or around the bus terminal. Pure idiocy. To put a sweet taste back in your mouth, here's a cool picture from Tulúm.

Tonight was our final night in the nightclubs. This time, it was Palazzo, an ancient Rome themed club, which unfortunately left most of us dissatisfied, like most of the territories who were paid a visit by the Roman Empire. It was very hot, and extremely crowded. There was a stripping contest, which was entertaining, but aside from that it wasn't great. The pillars weren't fooling anyone.

At 3am we headed over to an after party in a nearby club called Mandala Beach, which was really just a beach with a DJ on it. The after party was cool though, with decidedly different 'vibes', and the benefit of the fresh air. Supposedly it was a pool party, though I only saw about ten people in the pool the whole night. We hung out at the party for a couple of hours, then split the joint. And no, I don't mean we shared marijuana.

DAY SEVEN: BEACH AND MCDONALDS

Today was the last full day in Cancún. We had nothing lined up in particular, so decided to go back to the public beach in the centre of Cancún for what would be, at least for me, a final swim. It was nice to go back again, although the conditions that day were not friendly at all. There were pretty strong rips, and the waves were crappy. I went on a long walk along the beach, developing a new idea for a horror story that was completely unrelated to the situation at hand.

When we returned home, I had absolutely zero motivation to cook. I had no food left, and five days in a row of sausages and pasta had left me pining for something more sophisticated: McDonalds. I got there by foot, and ordered a delicious sample of unhealthy Western cuisine. It was a pleasant respite from unhealthy Mexican cuisine, though by no means is that a suggestion that I don't thoroughly enjoy the latter too.

And that's all there is to report from the seventh day.

DAY EIGHT: TURNING TWENTY, BEING SICK, GOING HOME

Today I turned twenty! My entrance into the third decade of life was unfortunately met by a deterioration of my cold symptoms, which had begun to set in a couple of days before. But oh well, that's just the way the wookie mumbles.

People started leaving, and the vastly differing schedules of peoples' returns meant no real plans had been strung together. I opted to go on a two-hour long solitary walk along the extremely long road our house was located on. Wandering along the black asphalt under the harsh heat of the Cancún sun, I pondered, as I always do, many topics, like turning twenty. I also spoke to myself in two languages, one less than in the forest at Valle de Bravo. It was a nice, relaxed wind-down after a busy week, though admittedly I required two ice-creams to make it back home.

Finally, I got packed up, and departed Cancún alongside the remaining Swede, Dutchman, Belgian, and Mexican.


If you made it through this entire post, congratulations. It is difficult to recount all the events of a whole week in just one blog post, but damned if I wasn't going to try. It was a definite change of scene from life in Mexico City, and a welcome one. While I'm glad to be back in the Distrito Federal, I will certainly look back on the week in Cancún as a climatic midpoint in my exchange semester, and one of its highlights.

Till the next time.