Centro Histórico

A few days ago, after having spent several hours painstakingly figuring out a good route, I resolved to travel into Mexico City's centre, known as the Centro Histórico. A place of huge variety and fascinating history, I had been looking forward to this excursion since my arrival, and it certainly lived up to its expectations.

I - GETTING THERE

During the laborious process of sketching out a route, I had become well aware of the fact that the city centre was a very long way from my home in Tizapán. What I had not anticipated was that most of my good work would be in vain anyway, as I would be doomed to get lost and have absolutely no clue where the hell I was. It is amazing how easy something looks on paper, and how ridiculously difficult it becomes once translated to the streets.

I had decided to get to the city centre using the Metro, which is an extensive underground train system that can take you to various hot spots in the Distrito Federal. It took me no less than an hour to get to the nearest metro station, Viveros, a trip I had expected to make in half that time. I ended up on the wrong main street (there are two), and after my phone repeatedly failed to make Google Maps happen, much less the GPS function, I decided to enlist the help of a couple of Mexican shopkeepers to direct me to the station.

Once I finally arrived, I had my first encounter with the Mexico City metro system. This was something I was actually very impressed by. Basically, you pay 5 pesos (around NZ 40 cents), and you can go anywhere in the city. Someone will correct me on that, so I'll hedge my claim and say almost anywhere in the city. Whether you're traveling one station or ten, switching lines or going straight, you pay the same 5 pesos. Insanely cheap? Yes, and apparently the price was recently put up...from 3 pesos. New Zealand readers will realise that this makes the system over ten times cheaper than our own.

It is also far more efficient. You pay beforehand, which means you don't get a boisterous conductor shoving his way down the train during the trip, knocking over anyone fatter than a sheet of paper. In fact, in the Mexican metro, 99 per cent of the time it would be physically impossible for said conductor to complete his little corridor journey, since the metro is almost always jam packed to the windows. You don't get a seat unless you're pregnant with triplets, ninety-six years old, or you got on the train when it was built. Sometimes you won't even be able to get on the train; every time a train gets in, which is luckily about every three minutes, hitherto friendly, polite people turn into violent bumper cars, shoving centenarians out of the way just to nab an area of unoccupied space that is half a centimetre squared larger than they are.

There is more. People try to sell you things in the train station. Oh boy do they try to sell you things. You can't descend a staircase without being screamed at by a fifty-something woman selling windmills made out of congealed cow's blood. And don't think you're off the hook once you get on the train - wizened vendors pay five pesos to board the metro purely in order to try and sell wheat biscuits to you. Now I've been hungry. I've been very, very hungry. But hungry enough to buy oat cookies from a solemn octogenarian, underground, in Mexico City? I hope I never experience that level of hunger.

II - ZÓCALO & FRIENDS

At last, at midday, I arrived at the Zócalo, which is what the Mexicans call the city centre. It is a giant square - a bit like that one girl at high school who did knitting - and it is very impressive to behold.

After wandering around for a little bit, I went to my first destination: Templo Mayor.

The Templo Mayor was one of the most important temples for the Aztecs, built in reverence of their gods. It wasn't all fun and games at the Templo Mayor though - numerous blood sacrifices were made, largely prisoners of war. As if being a prisoner of war didn't suck enough already.

Building commenced in the 1300s, but thanks to the good old Spaniards, the whole thing was largely destroyed in 1521.

After obliterating the Aztec temple, conquistador Hernán Cortés and his cronies then had a Catholic Church erected nearby.

Speaking of churches, my next stop was the Mexican City Metropolitan Cathedral. It is hailed as the largest cathedral in the Americas, which is quite impressive, since there is undoubtedly some stiff competition for the title in Catholic South America.

I could bore you with large descriptive paragraphs full of architecture jargon - I could wax lyrical about portals, facades, columns and naves - but I'd be ripping off Wikipedia, and not really have any idea what I was talking about. It's best to let the pictures speak for themselves on this one.

The full name of the cathedral is Metropolitan Cathedral of the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven, which sounds less like the name of a church, and more like the name of a fake Yu-gi-oh card you'd end up with after buying from a three star dealer on eBay. But I digress.

After my sightseeing, I had developed something of an appetite. In my hunt for food, I dived headfirst into a crazy street full of vendors selling all sorts of schlock. I'd show you some pictures of the schlock if I dared take my camera out in that river of people.

My search was not fruitless - I soon located a woman who was selling hotdogs and hamburgers. Well, actually just hotdogs, since when I asked for a hamburger she said she had none. And I thought corporate advertising was misleading. Nonetheless, the deal was three hotdogs for 20 pesos, less than $2 NZ. The sausages were pink as hell, but tasty.

After demolishing the lunch, it was time to move on.

III - LONELY PLANET WALK

For the first time since arriving in Mexico, I took out my Lonely Planet guide in public. Who cares if I looked like a tourist, the book had a nice walking tour route sketched out. I knew there was enough stuff to do in the Centro Histórico to demand several day trips, so I decided my best use of time would be to wander around the key streets and become acquainted with the area.

Lonely Planet first directed me to the Torre Latinoamerica, which sounds awe-inspiring in Spanish, whereas the English translation 'Latin-American Tower' is more like the auditory equivalent of an acting performance by Keanu Reeves.

The tower is 188 metres tall, and predictably it's used for white collar stuff. Several floors are used by firms controlled by fat cat Carlos Slim, one of the richest men in the world.

The street I walked along to get to the tower is called Avenida Madero, and as you can see from the first picture, it is a bustling street. Yes, I took the adjective 'bustling' straight out of my Lonely Planet book. Fine, it's animated. Anyway, all along the street, for whatever reason, there were people advertising spectacles. I don't mean spectacles in the sense of interesting events, I mean eyeglasses. The Spanish word is lentes, and by the time I got to the end of Avenida Madero, I would have taken a sentence in a Mexican prison over hearing that damned word one more time. The vendors don't just say their advertising slogans, they sing them. It is truly something else. Some of them actually have quite tuneful voices, which would be better put to use in a choir, rather than in producing the same soul-destroying eye mantra all day long. But I survived the ordeal.

Next I walked by Palacio de Bellas Artes, an iconic palace at the heart of Mexico City. There I go again, using travel writer buzzwords. 

  
The palace doubles as a museum, supposedly the first true art museum in Mexico, established in 1934. I went inside briefly, but seeing the long queue, I left. It was mid-afternoon already and I wanted to do the place justice.

The next thing was Alameda Central, an awesome park in downtown Mexico. Palacio de Bellas Artes is right next to it, so I didn't have to cover much distance to see the next attraction.

The stroll through the park was nice enough, but the highlight was encountering a group of Mexican teenagers having a rap battle. While a couple of guys jacked up the beats, around six of them rapped, taking turns to insult each other. My Spanish wasn't good enough to get everything they said, but I heard some decent punchlines. One of them said to another that he was dressed like his dog.

After that my walk continued. I was surprised to come across a Church of Scientology right next to the park. Talk about a wildcard.

There were fewer obvious attractions in the latter section of my walk, as I made my way back toward the Zócalo, though my route did take me through a small Chinatown. Tucked away in a not-very-obvious place, it was a lonely bastion of Asian restaurants in a city of taco joints.

I didn't dither around much - my legs were unsurprisingly complaining after six hours of walking, and I wanted to get home before nightfall. I eventually made it back to the Zócalo, though I resorted to a bag of sour Skittles and a bottle of juice for the energy. My first trip to the city centre may have afforded me only a cursory impression of the area, but it was enough to get an idea of what an exciting place it is, and the kind of craziness I can expect on subsequent visits. Tired but stimulated, I boarded the metro and headed home.

Mexico City: The First Three Days

CHAPTER ONE: TAXIS & TROUBLE

I have been many things in life, but a fan of long haul flights is not one of them. After a large number of hours in the air, mostly spent playing backgammon against a computer and failing to sleep, I eventually landed in Mexico City, at 9pm on the 29th of December. Boy was it worth it though.

Mexico City at night

To state the obvious, that is a LOT of lights. Ridley Scott could have shot Blade Runner here without needing any special effects. Also, what you see here is nowhere near the whole city. Mexico City is despicably enormous. When you arrive, you know you're at the airport. But venture out into a dark metropolis of 22 million people, and good luck figuring out where the hell you are.

The second I stepped off the plane, I was in Spanish mode. To an extent I was already in Spanish mode before that, since ninety five per cent of the passengers on the flight from Houston to Mexico City were Mexican, and talking away in Spanish accordingly. Eventually I made it out to the authorised taxi stands, lugging a twenty one kilogram suitcase with a broken wheel as well as a backpack and laptop. Oh yeah, authorised taxis are a thing here in Mexico City. Unless you want to be taken out into the middle of the desert and beaten repeatedly with a dead scorpion while everything except your skin is taken from you, it pays to use them. I used Sitio 300, a company with good reviews. As the driver took me to my hostel in Coyoacán, I had a mostly successful conversation with him in Spanish, though I had difficulty contributing much to our discussion on the quality of the roads, since I had forgotten the vocabulary for both 'flat' and 'bumpy.'

Once I got to the hostel, disaster struck. Almost as soon as I had got out of the taxi and greeted the hostel owner, I realised I had left my backpack and cellphone in the cab. Lo and behold, in the few seconds that had elapsed in the interim, the taxi had already left. On top of that, the hostel owner would only take cash, which I lacked at the time, so before I could even think about addressing the backpack problem, I had to cycle down to a local supermarket to withdraw four hundred pesos for the night.

When the money business was done, the hostel owner and I came up with a plan for how to recover my pack. Since Sitio 300 wouldn't pick up the damned phone, and instead spat hold music at the poor owner for ten minutes, we decided I would have to return to the airport and talk to the company in person. Catching a taxi at eleven o clock at night from a quiet part of town would have been a prickly proposition, had the owner not known a guy who could take me. Once we found the Sitio 300 stand at the airport, the manager got onto locating my pack, and it was recovered within a quarter of an hour. Needless to say, I was extremely relieved - both emotionally, and of several hundred pesos.

There was more trouble to come back at the hostel though. Before my little backpack rescue excursion, the owner had shown me which room I would be sleeping in, put my suitcase and laptop in there, and given me the keys. Well, I have never had a good memory, and when I got back at about midnight, I went for the wrong room. I must have fiddled with the wrong key in the lock for about ten minutes before somehow miraculously getting the door open. Of course, when I got in, my laptop and suitcase were gone! Where could they possibly be, I wondered? After half an hour of obviously fruitless searching, I gave up and went to bed. In the morning I told the owner my stuff had disappeared, and he accompanied me to the building, informing me that I had slept in the wrong room. My things were, of course, in the room I was supposed to have slept in.

My (wrong) room at the hostel

Embarrassed, I wolfed down the cornflakes and cheese on toast I was given as a complementary breakfast, while the owner kindly called me a taxi. By 10:30am I was out of there, having said muchas gracias, or some variation of it, a million times.

CHAPTER TWO: SETTLING IN

At around 11am on Wednesday the 30th of December, I arrived at my permanent accommodation at a place called Hidalgo 92. Hidalgo is a street in Tizapán, which is a colony of San Ángel, which is a colony of Álvaro Obregón, which is a colony of the Distrito Federal, which is...well yeah, you get the idea. If you call any of the above a barrio or 'neighbourhood', you will probably be corrected to colonia, which means almost exactly the same thing in Mexico anyway. If you call them colonias, you'll probably be corrected to barrio. Basically, no one knows what the hell they are, and if some day I eventually figure it out, I'm sure no one will care.

Hidalgo 92 is a big residence with 12 rooms, none of which were occupied on my arrival. Aside from two maintenance people, I was the only one in the place, since the owner is away on holiday, and the other students aren't arriving for another few days. Was it a strange feeling moving into a large student residence soon after my arrival in Mexico and being the only one there most of the time? Yes, yes it was. But it's a nice joint, and I quite enjoyed the silence for a while, after the hectic events of the recent past.

A relaxing area

A decorative fountain, declaring that it isn't an ashtray (cenicero)

Though I wanted to rest immediately after unpacking my bags, there were things to be done. For one, I had no drinking water. In Mexico, you don't drink tap water unless you want to be reminded of what vomit tastes like. Instead you have to buy large containers of spring water from a local store. It's dirt cheap, but a little cumbersome.

Another thing to do was withdraw cash to pay my rent. Unfortunately, when I finally found what seemed to be the only two ATMs within a hundred square miles of my residence, they were both switched off. It didn't occur to me before that they could be, but, they can. I tried withdrawing the cash at a local shop, but apparently they 'couldn't.' Whether that was due to their not having enough cash in the register, being forbidden from doing it by some legal notice, or simply their being unable to figure out that a nineteen year old white guy in a small suburb of Mexico City is probably paying rent and not preparing to buy cocaine, I don't know. Later on when I went out for dinner, I returned to the ATMs and was relieved to see that they were back on.

Speaking of dinner, food in Mexico ain't bad. But if you're a vegan, forget it. It's difficult to find an item of food in a Mexican restaurant that doesn't contain either meat, cheese, or both, in large quantities. Expect to do half the preparation yourself - if you order tacos, you will receive the tacos and filling separately on the plate. Sauces and limes are presented in separate dishes too, so that you can decide how much damage you want to do to the roof of your mouth. There's not much more to say on the food front, other than try not to have a peanut allergy. Not because the food has lots of peanuts in it, but because every single damned time I ask 'Contiene cacahuates?' - 'Does it contain peanuts?', I get looked at askance and have to repeat myself. 

CHAPTER THREE: URBAN EXPLORATION

On the evening of my second full day in Mexico, I ate at a local Japanese restaurant of all things. That my first diversion away from Mexican food coincided with my first feeling that something was overpriced was probably no coincidence. Anyhow, while I was eating, a man who I'll call Pablo - because that's his name - introduced himself and said he was getting into the renting game and looking for ITAM students to inhabit the house. Oh, ITAM stands for Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México by the way - it's the university I'll be attending here. More on that in later entries, if you haven't abandoned me by then.

I already had accommodation, and told Pablo as much, but he was happy to show me the house anyway, and I thought why not. After that, he even showed me the way to a nearby centre, San Jacinto, which had larger shops, necessary for acquiring certain items. In my case, the item I had wanted to acquire was a funnel. Yes, a funnel. The spring water cannisters you buy come without handles, a veritable stroke of genius on the manufacturer's behalf. Try holding and pouring a ten litre container of water into a 750ml pump bottle and see what happens. There is a funnel at the residence, which I have used several times to get the job done, but I thought it would be good to have my own.

Pablo recommended a 'bombilla' instead - a pump, which can be placed in the large cannister and used to siphon the H20 into a smaller container. Eventually we located one, though the amount of time it took to do so was staggering. In the process we entered several stores, and almost in every instance, I had to relinquish my backpack to a security guard at the front. I guess theft is more of a problem in Mexico, even in classy establishments like supermarkets. Anyway, I was very grateful for Pablo's help, and while we were walking between destinations, he answered all the questions I threw at him about the city. 

The following day - today, as it happens, I returned to San Jacinto, intending to see a museum called Museo del Carmen. Being New Years Day, it was closed, but it wasn't a wasted trip. I visited a church, ate lunch at a taco joint, and saw a squirrel at a local garden.

Said squirrel

Wandering the cobblestone streets was also nice, albeit not for my shoes.

A typical cobblestone street in San Ángel

Pablo had told me not to walk these streets alone at night, which is fair enough - I can't think of a place one would be more likely to get robbed than in a dark, cobblestone alley in Mexico City. But at two o clock in the afternoon, it was quite nice.

Later, I ate dinner out at yet another taquería - a place that makes tacos - and this time, I frankly found it disgusting. I made the mistake of ordering some cheese taco, so I was essentially served a few wan wraps and a bowl of congealed cow's milk. Don't come to Mexico expecting every taco to be the best thing since sliced bread - some may in fact be little more than sliced bread.

But enough complaining. So far I have found Mexico a cool place, and conceding a few minor misunderstandings, my Spanish gets me by. The title of this blog - 'Padrísimo' - is a Mexican slang word meaning 'awesome' or 'super cool.' I have a feeling that I will be using this word a fair bit here over the next six months.

Hasta la próxima!