Mexico City

Is not what I thought it would be like at all. The city is modern, clean and tidy with enormous shopping centres, a highly efficient and very cheap public transport network and lots of great little bars, restaurants and tidy green spaces. The very scary picture painted by so many travel sites, books and other warnings is once more so much of a boring and overhyped subject.

Driving into the city after a fairly long bus ride from Guadalajara we were welcomed into a huge bus station, El Norte Bus Station. The place has something like 120 coach parking spaces for boarding with three classes of buses able to park and board passengers. The place was impressive. Ferdi had given us some very straight forward directions which, on leaving the bus station were very easy to follow. Unlike in London where tourists have to walk around to find Victoria coach station which is frankly quite badly sign posted, the metro here was right on the door step as you'd expect. Paying the princely 2 pesos per ride we changed tubes once and found ourselves near the road and headed off to find it. The Metro system is old French stock it seems, the trains have rubber tires- the stations themselves are large and have lots of marble making them easy clean I suppose! The presence of the police at every station was a constant reminder that there is a HUGE gap between the rich and the poor here, as also the rides. Each trip was accompanied by one or two CD salespersons that livened up the trip with remixes of their CD's and yelling down the carriage 10 pesos per CD on getting on or off, in addition to them there were countless blind beggars, junk food sellers and more.

Wondering around town was fantastic too, the streets showing off the best mix of Mexican food culture through the ample (in number and size) food vendors, new cars from Europe as well as the ancient Beetles and VW T1 vans around the place. It is quite an exciting city, lots of cultural things to do as well as the usual shopping and entertainment. We chose a couple things to do culturally and managed to get in quite a lot of random evening activities…

We'd arrived and Jen had really wanted to visit a few places. The main priority was Frida Carlo's house (museum) and then as it was around the corner, and we had learned from watching Frida a few weeks earlier, there was Trotsky's place around the corner! We headed to both of course. Frida Carlo's museum was entertaining and in some instances, as with any modernist artists, suitable bizarre. The house and the documentation was very close to the film which was a nice change, too many films it seems make their own histories as applicable. Oli in his very dark skin was thought of as Mexican and given a local person discount, a 10 peso discount, how unfair, but devious! The area between Frida's and Trotsky's house is very very nice.. and could perhaps be compared to Hampstead or Chelsea, or the Viennese 18^th/19^th districts; the large mansions, nicely tended front gardens and paths were quiet and the Mexicans exceptionally helpful in helping us find the places. Sign posting was not the best. We headed off to meet Ferdi later that afternoon at his office… www.mexlinks.com have a look if you want to learn Spanish in Mexico – he can help you out! Following an exhausting day out, we headed to a bar for a drink or two prior to heading home and taking it easy. We'd been left a nice double bed in the flat which provided a great change from cheap hotel beds… so much nice sleep to catch up on.

The next day we took it easy and planned the onwards trips, sorted out flights and mooched a little, we'd planned to head out to http://wikitravel.org/en/Teotihuacan the next day. The trip outwards was interesting; the bus ride costing 33 pesos was a good hour from the edge of the city took us through picturesque villages before dumping us at a gate on the edge of what seemed like a very large green area. Starving, we got a cab to a restaurant and then took off to see the ruins, and rebuilds. The site is fairly substantial with the primary pyramids – the Temples of the Sun and Moon being the main attractions. They are huge! Interestingly, some of the rebuilding work seems to have added a fifth level to the temple of the sun which is the larger of the two, which makes the walk up just a little easier. It is definitely a very interesting place to go to. Of course, there were a number of sales people, selling the usual crap; tourist trail junk that collects dust and nothing more: Calenders, obsidian face masks, stupid noise makers and then more usefully, large straw hats which, we did buy and then left on the bus at the end of the day. We did replace them in Oaxaca for less than a third of the price though.

Mexico City has a whole neighborhood which is essentially Venice with grass and small houses etc. The tourists, locals and internationals helpfully guided to the boat area by pretty much anyone there and then we took to some boat negotiations. The initial price for three of us was close to 750 pesos and we ended up at 200 pesos for an hour and a half. Then we headed off to a small café style place and had some outstanding meat dishes with I think cactus. The boat trip- was a little on the relaxing side- heading off around various canals approached like on the streets by a myriad of vendors on smaller boats selling everything from the kitchen sink and concrete to food and stupid fluffy toys. The banks had a number of semi wild dogs and puppies which were a joy to watch, playing around with each other in the shade of the trees. Paying for Mariachi bands was left to other larger tour groups- of which there were so many that it made little difference if you paid or not to hear their music. We did end up buying some bbq corn on the cob doused in limejuice and chili they are a great light snack. The fish finish off the cob for you!

Our travel was to continue the next day – heading to Oaxaca with the night bus.. leaving at midnight and arriving at 7am.. of the seven buses leaving we finally managed to get seats on a second class ADO GL bus (UNO is the first class hereabouts). Having been cooked a great dinner by our hosts Ferdi and Carlos, we hit the road just after ten pm and, once more, trouble free used the public transport late at night to go to an extremely busy bus terminal! It was like getting to Stansted at 7am in the morning and finding all the queues at a maximum… quite mental! Very glad we had printed off the tickets before hand.