Mexico City

Well after a 5 hour flight we arrived in Mexico City, here`s another place where if you read the guidebooks and listen to my mate Vinny you would never leave your hotel room. First off the Lonely Planet tells you about muggings, street crime, scams and how you will be lucky to get out of a taxi alive never mind just being ripped off.

To make things worse Vinny kept going on about stories of kidnapping, rape and torture that he had read about, on enquiring where he got his information his story starts to have a few gaping holes. His reply was that he read it in a Keane article in Q magazine, well for the uninitiated Keane are a piss-poor beat combo from England who would most likely be told to stay in their hotel no matter where they stayed in the world. This is nothing to do about security issues in theses cities but more to do with them being lynched by honest decent people who realise that this evil excuse for a band dreamt up by a marketing team realising that the Coldplay album was going to be a year later should never have existed in the first place. Another thing there is nothing radical or good about not having a guitar player, it just means no self respecting human being who plays guitar wanted to be in a band with this sorry bunch of chancers.

Vinny should really know better after being brought up in the lawless barrio of Nitshill and with him teaching English as a foreign language to neds in Darkest Lanarkshire for the last half dozen years. Also if anybody comes back to me and says that they actually like Keane then it will be noted and your name will be added to the list and come the revolution we will see what your hopes and fears will be then.

Anyway back to Mexico City, after getting to our hotel safely in a taxi we dumped our rucksacks and headed into the heat at about 8 at night. We were quite lucky as our hotel was in the Central Historico district about 2 blocks from the Zocalo (main plaza in front of the Cathedral and the National Palace) and is also close to a metro station. After wandering for about half an hour we soon realised there wasn´t that much happening at night in this area as most of the few bars & restaurants seemed to close about 9pm. After dinner we managed to find a small cantina where we had a few Corona´s before heading back to our hotel. One of the many downsides to globalization is that I knew most of the Mexican beers before we got here, which is a shame as it`s always a good feeling trying a new beer on your first day in a new country.


Next morning we headed down to Zocalo to check out the sites, first stop is the Metropolitan Cathedral which took 2 and half centuries to complete after it was started in 1573 on top of an Aztec temple. The Spanish repeatedly built large Cathedrals over existing temples in the new world. The most impressive part of the Cathedral is the massive gilded Altar de los Reyes (Altar of the Kings) with it´s elaborate combination of sculpture and paintings, which is under some renovation at the moment but will be well worth a return visit once completed.

We then headed across the Zocalo to Palacio National to check out the huge murals by Diego Rivera (husband of Frida Kahlo) of Mexican Civilization from the early Aztecs up to the 1910 Revolution. The murals are mammoth with loads of detail but the day we went was quite dull and it would have been better to seen them on a brighter day. We then wandered about some markets before hiding from the sudden rain storm in the afternoon, up until this point we had only used our water proof jackets once or twice since leaving Rio de Janeiro in early March.

Next morning we walked to the Bosque de Chapultepec which is Mexico City´s largest park (4sq Km´s) which has museums, lakes, a large zoo and numerous statues and monuments. We went to the Museum of Modern Art within the park and as 2 of the 4 exhibition spaces were closed for renovation we were quite disappointed since we never got the chance to see many of the famous paintings by many Mexican artists. The Zoo also left us disappointed as they tend to do and every time I leave one I always say to myself that this will probably be the last zoo I go to. The animals never look happy in Zoos but in this one they didn´t look that well looked after.

After the zoo we wandered down to the Condesa district where there are loads of street cafes and bars. The weather was a lot better today with clear blue skies but by mid afternoon the heat forced us to have a few cold Coronas in a cafe bar and lazily sit and watch the old green & white VW Beetle taxis whizz past us. As we headed back to the hotel we were to have our first experience of the third busiest metro system in the world (after Moscow and Tokyo), and for only 20 pesos (10p) you can get to any of the 175 stops on the network. With trains arriving every 2 or 3 minutes it doesn`t take long to get from one end of the city to the other.

The Metro system also has it`s own form of entertainment, at every stop some young kid carrying a small amp and CD player comes on and plays about 10 seconds of each song from a bootleg CD he`s trying to punt whilst shouting out all the tracks and telling us how cheap the cd is before disappearing into the next carriage only to be replaced by another urchin selling a another CD. On some occasions you saw the kids who are on the next rung of the ladder with portable DVD players and showing excerpts from all the latest movies they have available in their holdall.

On Friday night we headed to a few local bars for some food and drink, the first bar we went were showing the Germany Vs Australia Confederations Cup game while a band tried to cover Radiohead, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones badly. The band weren`t that bad but their lead guitarist was shocking and totally out of time with the rest of the band, maybe he should hook up with Keane. The service was quite poor in the first bar so we headed to a smaller bar further up the street, where we stayed for the rest of the night. The bar was like the small unpretentious local bars you get in Barcelona or Seville serving tapas, local beers and some vine.... they also had some decent music on, which made a change.


Next morning we caught the early bus for an hours drive north to Teotihuacàn, to Mexico`s biggest ancient city and probably the capital of the pre-hispanic empire. The site contains two huge pyramids (Piràmide del Sol (Sun) and Luna (Moon)) and the Piràmide del Sol is the third largest in the world. When we arrived at the site there weren`t too many people in front of us and we managed to get to most of the main parts before the crowds. We climbed the 70m high Piràmide del Sol first and it was really very steep, it was hard to imagine that they built it without metal tools, pack animals or the wheel. Once at the top you realise how big the site is and in it`s hey day it covered more than 20 sq Km. We also climbed the other pyramid and wandered about all the other buildings trying to avoid all the hawkers selling their wares all with their own spiel "Almost Free today" , "Under a Dollar", "Closing Down Sale" and so on and on and on and on. Don`t let this put you off coming here because once you say no thanks they wander off looking for someone else to pester.


That night we jumped on the Metro down to Condeso, we found a great restaurant called La Gloria, which had a collection of rather strange paintings of people in all their glory. The restaurant specialised in Mexican and Italian dishes and both our meals where lovely, which had made a change after the previous two nights. We then went to another bar but Joanne wasn`t feeling that great so we headed back to the hotel with a promise to return to a few of the bars the following night.

Sunday morning (18th June) and the weather was still holding up with clear blue skys and temperatures definitely on the rise. After getting our bus tickets for the next day we headed to the Coyoacàn district to visit two more museums. The first we went to was the Leon Trotsky Museum where he lived in exile for the last few years of his life, the house remains as it was on the day in 1940 when a Stalin agent finally caught up with him and as the Strangles subtly put it "Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky? He got an ice pick that made his ears burn". The house has an impressive library of Trotsky`s books and a museum in the building next door contains many photographs and personal belongings from his time in Mexico and of his earlier years during the Russian Revolution.

Trostky also lived at the next house we visited on his arrival in Mexico in 1937 but this house is more famous for two other more local residents, the home of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. The house contains many works of art by the famous couple as well as other artists work from their collection. The house is a sprawling building will a large central colourful courtyard that gives the house it`s name "The Blue House". There is also a large collection of pre-hispanic artifacts collected by Rivera during his lifetime.

As promised we headed back to Condeso on Sunday night, again we had nice mexican meal in a place called La Buena Tierra before heading to a few bars. It has been a bit of a culture shock just having dinner for two again after our time on the Budget Expeditions tour because even when there wasn`t a group meal arranged we usually ended up out with some of the guys, so it`s been a bit strange not having to shout across a large table to be heard.

The first bar was called "Celtics" and guess what it was an Irish bar, they had advertised that they where showing the Mexico Vs Brazil game but they were not showing it until 10:30 so after a quick drink we headed to another bar who had the game on. The game was played at lunchtime - due to it being played in Germany, but was only being showed Pay-per-View live... so most bars where showing delayed transmissions.

So we saw most of the second half in a bar up the road and we cheered Mexico on to a lucky win over the World Champions. The next bar we went to had about 20 pool tables, so we hired a table and played for a few hours... the score didn`t really matter is was all just a bit of fun...well I actually won 11 games to 2 if you really want to know.

After all the worry about safety, we never had any problems and found Mexico City to be a fun and interesting place to be and it is somewhere we would recommend to anyone to visit.