Journal: Mexico City; Sonora market, Coyoacan, Museo de las intervenciones, Cuicuilco, Xochilmilco, UNAM campus, Pachuca, Real de Monte, Ixmiquilpan                                          go back            go home

 

Saturday 12th November

 

Spent a serious amount of time on the computer then tried out a new eating establishment in the neighbourhood. A bit of a disappointment really, the mountain of food we were promised turned out to be less than a small hill, and they made the too keen mistake. In Mexico it is standard service to whip you plate away when you have finished, and not wait for the rest of the table, but here the overkeen waiter had taken my plate and table mat before I even swallowed my last mouthful.

I spent the evening catching up with friends, and going to a bar full of English people. This is exactly the kind of behaviour I was planning on avoiding, but it is so easy to slip back into the ex-pat lifestyle when you are back in the neighbourhood.

 

Sunday 13th November

 

Because I am serious when I say I want to speak Spanish and get out there more, today I moved to a hostel in Coyoacan (the south of the city). I didn’t actually move until after 6pm and watching loads of tv.

But the plan worked ok, I met a Mexican student and went to the Sunday market, and had tacos in Coyoacan. There was one major flaw, I was bored. I prefer hanging out with Dave; we have a laugh.

 

Monday 14th November

 

In order to reduce pollution in the city old cars have one day a week when they are not allowed to circulate, my day is Monday. This system is great when you have a routine and you know what day it is. Unfortunately I have a bit of a problem remembering these days and I got stopped by the police driving into town. It was the smoothest encounter with the police I have ever had (out of 3 in total) and I got out a wad of money to pay him off. Of course, being a gringo, I paid far too much, but it was all over fairly quickly. The way it works is this: the policeman stops you by shouting with his loudspeaker, he asks for your licence and car ownership papers, and then tells you to take your car to the pound for 24 hours and pay a massive fine to get it back. You ask him sweetly if there’s any way it can be sorted out right here, and he tells you how much he wants. In my case I dug out half of this amount and he was more than happy.

The dilemma: for me it’s better to pay him and for him it’s better to get paid, but the money goes straight into his pocket. I may well be funding his drinking sessions which keep him away from his family and make him more likely to hit his wife. If I really wanted to make a stand against corruption and do the right thing by the country I should go to the pound and pay the fine to the authorities, but at the end of the day who can be bothered to do that.

The rest of the day I travelled by metro.

I met Dave in the centre and we walked to the biggest market in Mexico city. The streets on the way were full with stalls of cheap clothes and xmas decorations. These are supposed to be dodgy neighbourhoods, but the main problem is they are so hectic, we didn’t see the pavement for about six blocks. By the time we arrived at the market we were already stressed out, but inside the building it was remarkably calm. I purchased an enormous vegetable sack which I am planning to use as luggage on my way home (I learnt that from the Guatemalans) and in the vegetable section we saw mountains of garlic and stacks of folded banana leaves taller than Dave.

Our main goal, however, was Sonora market, the so called “witches” market. We had both read articles about all the weird things it sells, love potions, talismans, and endangered animals, and were expecting a really spooky place.

What they don’t tell you is that to get to the weird stuff you have to walk through very normal looking stalls of plastic toys playing loud pop music. Out the back we do see some stalls selling herbs, and when we really start looking we see a skull and some crosses made of quick burning wood. I definitely saw a book about voodoo, and there were lots of candles. But overall it is nowhere near as weird as I expected. The animal section stank of piss, we hung around the cages of birds just long enough to see some pigeons. There were about seven in one cage, and the brown one was dead.

I was trying to dig deeper and find the spookiness so I asked about the eggs for sale. “Yes” she told me “they are very special they are from a gayaucho”. Maybe all will become clear when I try and translate that last word. Looking at some of the flyers we were given it seems that eggs are special because the people here can read eggs, and cleanse you with eggs - as well as the usual tarot and palm reading.

We spent a total of about ten minutes inside and were slightly pleased to be able to tick it off our lists, but mainly just drained.

On the way back to the hostel I found a wonky building which looked quite dramatic. You can see where one end has sunk (because Mexico City was built on a lake) and there are some serious cracks in the walls where it has been pulled apart.

 

this is a pre-hispanic map of Mex city, the arrow marks roughly the centre of town.

 

With all my touristy achievements I didn’t manage to make any friends today, and after dinner alone during which I was subjected to an American on the next table ranting about how great and weird Sonora market is, I went to bed early.

 

Tuesday 15th November

 

Today I had some wonderful tourist action. Firstly in Coyoacan, which cannot really be part of DF, it is quiet, with shady plazas and small streets. I couldn’t hear car alarms or see any flyovers with yellow fences. It even got to the point where I was surprised to see cars with DF number plates. I made my way to the “Museo de las Intervenciones” where I tried to figure out once and for all when Mexico lost nearly half it’s territory and why the US intervened in 1914 and 1916. Well, they lost Texas first in 1836 after the Alamo and all that. Then in the proper war with the US in 1847 they lost California, New Mexico and some other land. In fact what now remains of Mexico is only 45% of what they once had.

So I figured that one out, but I couldn’t see why they invaded in the 1900’s.

My next stop was Cuicuilco, one of the oldest ruins in Mexico, started in 600BC and a bit special because it is a circular pyramid (that would be a cone then). Why then did it end up swamped by a massive shopping centre and a junction of Mexico City’s M25 motorway equivalent?

 

                                  

 

Even with the traffic zooming by, the site is a nice place for a wander around. It was buried by lava from a nearby volcano which you can see in the distance, and the land around the site is filled with cacti. It helps you to imagine what the valley of Mexico looked like before it was filled up by the city and the sprawling suburbs of grey concrete houses.

My final stop was Xochimilco. The canals did look a bit grim I have to say, but I only saw the first little bit. Even though it was nearly dark I was offered a boat ride with mariachi or marimba music. But I’m not quite that sad. Can you imagine me sitting in a boat alone at sunset with my own private musicians? No.

 

                                          

 

Driving back to the hostel I realized that my Mexico City driving is not quite as advanced as I thought. Navigating unknown areas in the dark had me in a number of dodgy situations. Twice I crossed the light railway track through a red light because of pressure from behind. Once I really wasn’t sure whether to obey the red light on my left, or the green light on my right – but again, the hooting from behind helped my decision.

After I had missed my turning I really needed to turn right off Insurgentes street but the first few junctions said no right turn. Finally there was a sign telling me to get in the right hand lane so I did. Imagine my surprise when everyone in front of me turned left. At that point I gave up trying to figure out what was going on and asked the policeman – always a last resort option.

To help you further understand Mexico City driving I will tell you what happened when I accidentally blocked a side road whilst queuing at a red traffic light. The ford X-trail drove up with its bull bars nearly in my side and did…..absolutely nothing. He just waited quietly. They expect that kind of thing.

My evening was not as intellectual as I was hoping for. The students who live at the hostel did not have anything much to say for themselves as they played poker (not for money obviously). The larger lad was trying too hard and too badly to be cool. He shouted a tad rudely at our busy friend/waiter for more limes, and I was pleased to see he got told off! Then he was using his mobile phone like a walky talky. Is this the new rich kid thing? Too lazy too hold it at your ear during the call?

The evening went seriously downhill (and I went to bed) when all the lads piled over to the sofa to watch NWWF. Any ideas what that stands for? Naked Women’s Wrestling League.

They really are naked, but I’m not so sure that what they are doing is wrestling. Boys and their fantasies eh.

 

Wednesday 16th November

 

I finally visited the UNAM campus today. It’s called University City because it’s so big. I spent the day with Vladimir, a Zapatista supporter I met in the jungle, and we had a great time. I finally got the Spanish practice I was looking for, but even better than that I really liked the guy. We had things to talk about, looked at the murals and went climbing around on statues. This is probably a terrible thing to say, but I have met very few Mexicans I get on with in Spanish - mostly because my Spanish is still not great, but also because of massive cultural differences. Like when men keep switching position because they think it’s good manners to walk between you and the road, and when they don’t ask any questions because they aren’t interested, or they ask for your phone number after talking to you for two minutes (that’s happened to me twice in the last week). As far as Mexican girls go, I haven’t really met any. Boring would be the word that springs to mind from what little experience I have. (Mental note: must try harder to meet girls).

Anyway after five hours of walking and talking Spanish I was drained. I made it back to the Bistro with a smile on my face and had several glasses of wine.

It was strange being on a university campus again, seeing people milling around in massive gangs and eating in the cafeteria. Maybe I should try and do a Masters in Spanish at UNAM!! Now there’s a challenge.

 

Thursday 17th November

 

Hangover. That happens more often in Mexico City than other places, I think a certain French restaurant is to blame.

I drag myself to the dentist then to a garage then to another garage.

The good news is that I do have new brake pads (the new place didn’t rip me off after all!) and that I didn’t spend any money today. The bad news is that after 6 hours of hanging around, and a bit of tweaking from both garages, the brakes still squeak. Ah well, maybe it will sort itself out.

I managed one game of dominoes at the local before retiring.

 

Friday 18th November

 

On the road again. I made it 70 km’s down the road to Pachuca where I am currently residing in a sixties style hotel room. The national park beckons tomorrow, but today I settled for some pasties and a trip round the city on the tourist tram.

There are loads of English things here in Pachuca because loads of miners came over from Blighty at the end of the nineteenth century. Did you know they introduced football to Mexico? Also they brought Cornish pasties which are still called “pastes” here. They have done weird things to the pasties, like add shedloads of chili and invented one filled with sausage, but you can definitely see the resemblance.

Other references on my tour (it really was my tour – I was the only person on the tram. Sitting there looking like a dork) were the English style house, the English style fountain and the main feature of Pachuca, the monumental clock, was partly built in a factory in England.

Pachuca doesn’t see that many tourists and at the end of the tour I was very close to giving the bus boys a grand explanation of my Cornish ancestry and my subsequent interest in pasties. Luckily I didn’t - they thought I was strange enough already.

A “typical plate” for dinner consisted of 3 different types of meat, some beans and some weird tasting enchiladas. It wasn’t mole sauce, but it had that strange chocolate and chili flavour. Always good to try the local specialties.

 

Saturday 19th November

 

At breakfast I witnessed some silly Mexican things to add to my list. On Azteca breakfast tv there was what appeared to be a ventriloquist. Pretty poor entertainment at the best of times, but when I looked more closely I noticed it was a real person sitting on his lap with lines drawn under his mouth to look like a dummy. Crap. Then in the paper I saw the predicted cost for a project to create an autonomous university in the state of Hidalgo. Their estimate was 112 million 768 thousand 899 pesos. They gave their estimate to the nearest peso! That’s to the nearest 10 cents. Bloody ridiculous. They also give the population of cities to the nearest person. By the time they have finished painting the sign they must already be wrong.

Anyway, after purchasing some take away pasties I headed off on the “Corridor de las montanas” which took me to Real de Monte where I learnt more about miners. There is an English cemetery with granite stones just like at home I was pleased to see some good Cornish sounding names like Samuel Trelease and Enrique Trebethen. There are still people in town with surnames like “Taylor” and “Skewes”. The man who guarded the cemetery spooked me a bit. He told me I was too early then let me in, and when I came back he had locked me in. He let me out straight away, but what terrible things did he think were going to happen if he left it open for ten minutes?   

I found the museum and struggled through a lengthy guided tour. There are two houses here called “Casa Cornish” and the vapour machines (whatever the hell they are) came from Cornwall too – Cambourne in fact. They took a year to arrive by ship and train.

 

                                        

 

The English also brought grass and trees, and technology like drills and charcoal burning lamps. I think that about covers it!

We walked 150m along a flat tunnel into the hill and saw a miner’s toilet. Apart from respiratory diseases and the effects of cold and damp, they also had problems with treading the shit all over the place. I think he said they were emptied every two days. None of the mines are running anymore, but the toilet in the Real de Monte mine still functions sometimes; the excursion there involves going down nearly 450m then walking through two kilometers of tunnels, it takes two and a half hours and some people get caught short. You wouldn’t catch me down there.

The most recent deaths in the Acosta mine at the museum (1973 I think) were because a power cut meant the brakes didn’t work. 30 people plummeted down the mine shaft in the lift. 3 of them survived. The scary thing is that there are power cuts all the time - even in this century. Did people put their lives in the hands of the Mexican electricity board every time they went down?

In the nineteenth century miners would work 13 hours a day carrying rocks (up to 50kg) out of the mine. They were paid 1 peso a day. Children aged 10 – 11 couldn’t carry as much so they were paid half that. (Peso’s were worth more in those days). The average life expectancy of a miner was 30 – 35 years.

On our tour the Mexican men were predictably macho - as soon as they saw the little train full of chunks of rocks they went over to try and pick them up, and I was particularly amused by the woman who decided to wear shorts and her slippers down a cold damp mine.

 

                  

 

In the national park El Chico I lost myself in the woods for an hour (literally) and concluded that Pachucans make fine pastry. The pasties would be winners if it weren’t for the occasional chili mouthful that makes your nose run.

A change of plan brought me to Ixmiquilpan tonight in search of thermal pools. But it turned out that with the howling winds and imminent darkness, 36 degrees centigrade doesn’t feel that hot. My evening was mainly spent trying to kill cockroaches. It’s not easy when your shoes are so soft. I tried drowning them (I found them in the shower) but they kept chasing me around the bathroom. I tried suffocating them with wet tissue, but both of them escaped. Then I gave up completely on having a shower. It was too distracting having them flailing around.

Luckily in the morning they were both dead.

 

Sunday 20th November

 

The problem with bad days is they always result in me spending lots of money. But it’s worth it because I am much happier in this four star hotel than driving round town looking for a cheap white walled insect pit. And they gave me a twenty percent discount, how could I say no?

So the bad day went like this…

Well actually the first half hour was excellent. I discovered that the hotel shower was so hot I could turn the bathroom into a steam room - lurvely. I was feeling pretty refreshed when I went out for breakfast, and discovered that the zócalo was closed to traffic. Darn. I should have known better than to let my car get trapped in the car park. I have seen this kind of Sunday action before. They shut out the traffic and have school children marching instead. Today is “Revolution Day” which means the whole town is out, and although my neighbours tell me it will last an hour, I am not so sure.

As with any really bad day it went steadily downhill. The first hour of marching was reasonably fun, I ate a good street breakfast; sweet bread, eggy tortillas, chocolate flavoured corn drink and freshly squeezed orange juice (total cost 1 pound), and watched some of the action. The marching bands varied in quality (usually the smaller the child the worse the noise that came out of the bugle), there was a lot of waving red, green and white flags, and the primary school kids dressed up as Zapata were very cute. At Benito Juarez School it seemed slightly unfair that the boys got to do all the daring stuff like dangerous gymnastics and jumping through flaming hoops, while the girls were waving around sticks with paper plates stuck to the end.

 

             

 

Every school in the area had a march pass the presidential palace, and I don’t know if they coordinated with each other but no two schools waved around the same implement. Some had balls, others giant hands or batons, and some poor secondary girls must have got the short straw to end up carrying feather dusters.

I feel sorry for the teachers. There’s no way I would get up at 8 am on Sunday in order to march around a freezing square in high heels. But some of the PE teachers were clearly loving it, shouting like military men, and watching their pupils marching. They are in control and they want the crowd to know it.

After two hours I took a walk to find the end of the parade. There was no end. They had actually blocked the main highway that goes all the way to the states and as I walked back further I started getting frustrated with the whole thing. It’s so Mexican, it feels totally repressed and forced. These bands are playing the same few bars over and over again, the drumming and the repeated rhythms. The monotony is torturous after a while. Why is marching so clever anyway? The scary thing is that they have been practicing for months in school. I wonder if these drummers will ever get the sound out of their head.

I needed to get away from it and headed to the park. According to the signs it was funded by the PRI (the political party who ended over 70 years in power in 2000). They have a reputation for “buying” votes by funding community projects, but they obviously stopped the funding when they lost because the all the little bridges and displays are in a bad way.

I must be turning into a bit of a hippy. Not only was I distracted from enjoying my shower last night by cockroaches dying slowly, but when I saw a bird with a three foot wing span in a fifteen foot cage in the park I felt for it. How badly must it want to fly? The monkeys looked pretty miserable as well, even though you could hardly see them through the white criss cross fence.

I made it back to my hotel room to stick my head under a pillow until it was all over, but to my horror a soft rock church service was going on in the function room ten feet from my door. No joke – I was lying on my bed with tissue stuffed in my ears trying to watch tv to take my mind off things.

At 1:30 pm (four and a half hours later than planned) I was finally able to leave - my mission to get to Xilitla still seemed doable.

At 4:30 pm I was only about half way there. I hadn’t counted for following trucks through heavy fog and rain on winding mountain roads. That is not my idea of a fun road trip.

 

                          

 

After much frustration the clouds cleared and I could see mountains all around me. That just made me even more annoyed because clearly the drive I had done with twenty foot visibility was through amazing scenery.

So here I am in my four star hotel in Tamzunchale. The staff are actually friendly and I’m really holding my hopes out for being able to have a conversation with someone today.