We decided to take an overnight bus to Mexico city as it saves us a nights accommodation costs and normally you can sleep through the long journey and arrive around 7-8 am. However it didn’t quite go to plan for this trip. We booked late and got the seats right next to the toilet so spent the night kept being woken up by people going to the loo. The trip itself was shorter than we thought and we ended up getting into Mexico city bus terminal at 5 am, while it was still dark. Due to the high altitude here, when it is not sunny the temperature really drops, so we sat in several jumpers trying to keep warm (I even had my towel wrapped around me) until around 8 am when the sun came up and we could travel around the city in the light, it’s always better to travel around somewhere unknown in daylight.
We used the metro to get to our hostel – it is a bargain at $5 MX (20p) per journey – but ended up trying to get a train at rush hour. It was absolutely packed, there were queues for each train door, a woman passing us saw we looked a little phased and said to follow her to the women only section, here the queues were a little shorter and we managed to get (be shoved) into a train and again some local women helped us work out our stop and indicated to the other people we needed to get off – really helpful given how packed it was.
Mexico City is absolutely huge and a lot nicer than I was expecting it to be, although it is packed with people. Trying to cross the road feels like a giant game of bulldog. But we managed to get through the crowds and reach our hostel, which is very nice and spotlessly clean, a lovely surprise after the ones in Oaxaca that looked like they needed a bit of a scrub in places. We decided to spend the day doing boring domestic tasks as we were too tired for sight seeing. We went shopping to replace various broken/used bits (shower bag, earphones, soap, etc.) and we also bought some new clothes, I’ve lost weight (Woo! Who knew exercise was good for you?) so needed some new shorts and tops and we both needed to get some jumpers for South America as it’s in the southern hemisphere and the middle of winter there. We didn’t do much in the evening, we went to a bar for dinner and then headed home. Grace wishes me to note here she wanted to dance to David Bowie but I was to tired and stingy to pay the entrance fee and alcohol to get us drunk enough to dance. I wish to note her dancing sucks anyway, so there.
On Saturday we decided to do a day of museums, we first looked around the national anthropology museum, it was free to get into and huge. The ground floor covered the past of different indigenous tribes in Mexico and their ways of life and artefacts and the floor above showed how they live now. It was really interesting, especially as this one was in English and we could actually read about what we were seeing. There were so many impressive artefacts from tiny clay models and obsidian tools to huge stone statues. After the anthropology museum we went to see Templo Mayor, today it is an archaeological sight being excavated, it once was a large temple where the Aztecs are believed to have seen the symbolic eagle perched on a cactus with a snake in its beak, which can still be seen in the Mexican flag. The Spanish settlers had demolished the temple and built over it and it was only in 1978 when electric workers unearthed an eight tonne stone carving of a Aztec goddess that the sight was rediscovered and the decision was made to demolish the colonial buildings and unearth the temple. After Templo Mayor we had a walk around Mexico city watched some ‘traditional dances’ which felt more like tourist traps than tradition and looked around a few pretty churches that were enormous, sectioned off into smaller sections for worshipping different saints. The church also had a gift shop/convince store which is a first, but I guess they’ve got to fund new gold ceilings somehow.
In the evening we met up with Antonio, a friend of mine from university who is from Mexico City. He showed us a nice restaurant in a beautiful old building and we asked him 101 questions we had stored up over the last 6 weeks about Mexico (and complained a lot about tacos and sweet bread). We had a really nice evening chatting about all the differences between food and culture in Mexico and in the UK, and funny stories of misunderstandings and culture shock in each others counties among other things. We also went to a nice rooftop bar, and we finally got to ask about bar snacks, in bars they always give you free popcorn which is great, but why do Mexicans insist on putting hot salsa on it? Salsa goes on literally everything here. We managed not to insult Antonio’s culture too much and will hopefully be seeing him later this week.
I’ll keep you updated,
Lots of love,
Alice x