Frustration and the City

OH Mexico City: a fun but most frustrating weekend. My credit card was blocked and I stupidly left my other card in GDL, so spent far too much time out of my already fleeting trip trying to get cash out and trying to contact my bank. But- I saw the place, at least.

I left GDL main bus terminal at 8am and arrived at the north terminal in MEX 7 hours later. The coaches are pretty good here- not cheap, but comfortable, safe and I even got a free sandwich. I then spent almost an hour trying every single ATM in the building along with a queue of other people having similar problems. Eventually, i set up camp by a tourist information desk and waited for the attendant to return from her lunch. The most depressing thing was that a ticket for the metro was only 3pesos (15p), but I only had 70 cents left in my bag... But just as I began to have visions of living on the streets for the weekend and having to sell my shoes for water, the attendant returned and emptied her purse of coins, insisting that I take them all and get the tram. Weirdly enough, when I got on the tram, the driver shouted a lot of things at me that I couldn't understand, before waving to me to get on for free... I couldn`t complain.



So I made it into the centre and found my hostel, still sans cash but with shoes still in possession. My hostel was amazing, actually: really cheap, modern ensuite rooms and free breakfast and dinner on the roof terrace. I also met a lot of great people, including a girl from New Zealand who had just left her life in Australia and decided that from Mexico she would move to Canada and find a circus-related job.. There were also two German ladies in my dorm, one of whom apologised to me as soon as we met, because ¨most of the world hates Germans¨; the other had done my route through Central America in reverse, and could confirm that she felt completely safe and that it was all ¨a piece of cake¨. I also met a nice Russian man, who told me not to go to Colombia because they have too many invisible drugs, and that Europeans were idiots for believing in 9-11.

On the Saturday, I did a lot of walking. I explored the area before using the very last of my coins to get to the huge Chapultapec park, which felt a little how I imagine Central Park, NYC to be. It has a massive, free zoo in the centre of it, a boating lake, and is surrounded by museums. Having recovered from the stress of failing to get through to Halifax that morning, I set out to find a corner shop where I could try topping up my phone and calling again. My card did seem to let me pay for transactions on and off, I just couldn´t take any cash out... so when the cashier at the corner shop had already added on 100 pesos to my phone and my card was declined, I thought this might be the moment I had to sell my shoes and possibly my dignity in order to get home in one piece. Before I knew what had happened, the guy behind me in the queue had paid my bill for me! It was only 5 pounds, but that´s a lot of money in Mexico. I was really touched (and relieved) and pretty amazed at how kind people were in this supposedly unfriendly city of drug-fuelled decapitations and gangs.

National Theatre

After another failed phone call, I set out to meet a journalist-friend from London, who now happens to be living in Mex. City. I got pretty lost. I got extremely lost. But we found each other eventually and went to a tapas bar in the boho-artsy area of Condesa. Journalism Man lent me some cash to get me through the weekend, and Sunday was a more successful day.

With globe-trotting New Zealand girl, I saw the Diego Rivera murals in the Palacio National- an impressive building with a heavy slant to it, due to the fact that everything in the city is sinking (by 3 inches a year!) having been built on really soft, aqueous ground. The theatre used to have steps leading up to it, but now has steps leading down... Pretty crazy. One can´t help but feel that one day the city will all be swallowed up by some kind of swamp monster, and completely disappear underground. The murals were amazing, but I have to say I still prefer Orozco`s in Guadalajara.

Diego Rivera murals

Later we went to the museum of Anthropology, located in the main park. Museums are free on Sundays in Mexico City, but this one still charged non-Mexicans. I wouldn't have minded so much, but the security people picked us out of the queue before we'd even spoken to them on the assumption that we were foreign. Yes, obviously we were actually foreign... I will never be able to disguise myself as Mexican. But I did wish I could speak fluent Spanish at that moment just to shock them.

Me holding up the Aztec calendar

I planned on getting the midnight bus back to GDL, so that I could sleep through the journey, and killed time at the bus terminal by watching the Oscars in spanish with 100 other Mexican travellers and bus drivers, before having a good old wash in the public toilets just like a tramp (and not for the first time, either.) Annoyingly, I found that my return bus was a lot newer than the one I had spent half a day on when arriving- this one had TV/computer screens on the backs of seats like on a plane, and so I spent most of the night watching mediocre spanish films rather than sleeping. Actually, none of the films were half as terrible as "Runaway Train" which was playing on my bus trip to Puerto Vallarta- it's a train, it's running on rails. If Denzel had just snapped to it and cut off the electricity the problem would have been solved within 20 seconds.

Again, it was nice to get "home" to Guadalajara, but I'm trying to tell myself that once I'm travelling properly I won't miss it.

In other news I'm famous in Felixstowe (as if I wasn't before...) and have had a couple of articles published online and for the newspaper. The links are very handily copied into the "Portfolio" page of this blog. Self promotion and accepting the fact that the world can see and judge my writing is a lot easier when I am 5684.61 miles away from home.