#12: Mexico City - Mexico - A Year and a Day
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Stumble It!v> Mexico City Tuesday, 14th October 2003
This is, I hope, the shape of things to come. I'm currently in the city of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. Familiar amount of tourists as compared with Guanajuato, but feels different, feels like there is more life in the place and more going on that's nothing to do with us. Perhaps this is just because it is a much bigger city. I think I will like it here. Plan to spend a week working in a local centre for street children in the mornings and salsa classes in the evening (and sleeping in the afternoons). Importantly, my bed in the Santa Isabella hostel costs only 50 pesos (£2.70) a night. After this I plan to go to the even cheaper San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, then across the border to Guatemala. Feel like my Mexican adventure is working its way to a close, Guatemala keeps beckoning.
Leaving Guanajuato
Still don't really understand what my problem with Guanajuato was. A wiser, probably happier person would just leave it at that, but I have long realised that I have a part of my brain that tirelessly gnaws at things and so have generated all kinds of theories about why the place wasn't right for me. I would detail them, but when I tried to vocalise them to other people in the city, I quickly realised that they were either patently factually flawed, breathtakingly and embarrassingly hypocritical or just a bit patronising to a load of people that really weren't worthy of my patronisation.
Either way, I decided to move on after the two weeks I had paid for my room were up. I have missed the by all accounts incredible Cervantino festival as a result, but figured that I didn't really want thousands of drunk tourists on the streets and tripled prices for everything. Also, I had an encounter that I decided to interpret as a sign from God/The Universe that I should move on.
The girls from Michoacan
On a Sunday I was walking to my standard afternoon coffee in Plaza San Fernando, when I heard a female voice call out, "Hey Gringo!" It was a group of three girls, who started giggling when I smiled and waved at them. For reasons both high minded (they looked very young, even by my standards) and tactical, I decided not to go over to them and continued on to the plaza. Their group of about six girls and one boy then followed me to the square, and we started chatting in Spanish. They were all on a school trip from their town in the state of Michoacan - I told them I was from England, so not technically a gringo, and one tall girl with red streaks in her hair said, "Yes, you are very handsome, they are all fat and pasty white." They asked me how old I was, I said "veinticinco" - I asked them and the red streaked girl said sixteen - all her friends started giggling again. It turned out they were all about 14 or 15. The boy said to me in English, "She wants you to kiss her" - then hastily adding, "on the cheek" (we were in Mexico after all...) All the girls wanted kisses, so I kissed them all, then they took photos of me hugging them, then I exchanged email addresses with the tall girl - her's was surprisingly risque. I kissed them all again and they went off to meet their teacher.
I felt immediately that this was the problem with Guanajuato (ie: that these were people from out of town who wanted to talk to me), that I was not a novelty at all, and I should leave for less jaded places. Perhaps it takes a bit of an odd mind to interpret this kind of thing as a message from God, but I felt I needed to heed it.
But I had a lot of great times in Guanajuato. I loved learning to cook my beef and/or egg burritos, I went to a great birthday party, and to a quiet private friends and family dinner party of one of the language teachers (not really sure why I was invited), went on what I think was a date with a very nice American girl who was studying in the town, which was a fun evening even if nothing came of it. I went to a concierto in the Theatro Principal, watched several apparently endless parades through the streets, had salsa lessons from friends and had a going away party on my last night. I also seem to have learned quite a bit of Spanish, which is a pleasant surprise, given past experience of my attempts to learn languages.
To Mexico City
I felt great to be travelling again. I felt as fresh as my first day of this RTW trip, excited by everthing new on the road to Mexico City (called D.F. here), ready to start conversations with anybody and excited by the thought of all the things to see in the capital. I am intensly glad that I came to DF: seeing it has forced me to discard some of the views of the country that I now see were forming in my mind, and has made clear some of the things that were confusing me.
Pride and History
In the very first conversation I had with a Mexican (the student who offered me the chewing gum on the bus out of Tijuana), I asked what was special about Mexican culture, what made people here different. He said without hesitation, "Pride in Mexico. Pride in the war of independence against Spain", pride in many other historical events which I have since forgotten. At the time I didn't really understand what he meant - aren't all people more or less proud of their country's history? But in Mexico City I felt like I was starting to understand something of this. Again I would remind the reader that I know nothing about Mexico, but these were my impressions.
What I saw in DF was the grandeur of Mexico, the grandiose cathedral, the government palacio, the home/semi-shrine of the Mexican political hero Juarez, the magnificent Palacio de Belle Arts. This was a world away from sleepy provinces of the Baja frontier and the good natured beach resorts like Mazatlan. But I also saw something of the pride in Mexican history and achievements — primarily through Diego Rivera's epic fresco "Sueno de una Tarde Dominical en la Alemada Central", a crowd of Mexican icons past and present gathered in the nearby Alemada city park. Cortes, in plate armour and with bloody hands, looked on from the corner, heroes, invaders, politicians, artists and poor folk thronged in the Alameda, with Frida Kahlo in the centre resting her hand on a young Rivera's shoulder. Perhaps it was just a painting, but reading (as best I could) reviews of the work, and seeing photos of the immense effort that the government had taken to save the fresco after its first home had been earthquake damaged, this felt like it spoke of something I hadn't realised about Mexico before. This wasn't saying, "Hasn't our little country had a turbulent past?"; this was Mexico and the world, this was Mexico's history being as important as the rest of the world's, this was along the lines of "when one is tired of Mexico City, one is tired of life, for all the world pass through it"
I don't imagine I have much idea of how the governing elite of Mexico view themselves, but I now suspect it is very different to how many people in America and the West think of the country — this is a country which was perhaps much more proactive and confident than I had presumed, one happy to keep giant murals idealising Marx and communist triumph in its government buildings.
The Museum of Anthropology
Mexico City's Museum of Anthropology is a vast, essential but
exhausting odyssey into the pre-Hispanic world. I spent two hours
there, and my brain was a painful sludge by the end — I could have
spent two days and probably not seen it all. The museum had an
amazing collection of artifacts and information, literally from the
evolution of homo sapiens to the arrival of Cortes, but it was all so
vast it was just hard to take in. I would definitely advise reading
even a little on the period before visiting, to aid assimilation —
the children's book on Aztec mythology my parents had bought me years
and years ago suddenly seemed a godsend.
What did permeate, however, was how bloody and realpolitik it all was. The great monuments of the era, Palenque, Teotihuacan etc, weren't built out of devout spirituality or to track the stars or whatever, but as tools of political control. The elites of each region seemingly built their immense religious constructions to convince everyone that they had divine right to rule, much like the ceremony and myth of the 16th century kings of Western Europe. The different civilisations were frequently at war and by the arrival of Cortes, the Mayans and I think the Zapotecs as well were already in long decline.
But the advantage that the museum has over a place like say the British Museum, is that once you have read about the pyramids of Teotihuacan, you can actually go and climb the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, an hour or so north of Mexico City. Standing on the top of the highest pyramid in the Americas, the true scale of the ruined city and the lost civilisation became apparent. I'm looking forward to visiting other sites in Mexico and Central America now with a small amount of knowledge of what was going on.
Hostel Moneda
I stayed in Hostel Moneda, on the recommendation of a friend. It was a very fun place, but like Macbeth's castle, it was all but impossible to get a good night's sleep there. The cafeteria/bar overheard conversations like, "yeah, I'm sure there are some home matches coming up, but I just can't find a fixture list anywhere" — I was back among the English again. I decided to join a group of English travellers for some beers, I introduced myself and said, "it's great to be among English people again, if only to remind myself why I wanted to leave the country." Fortunately everyone laughed. My absurdly sociable and energetic aspect had returned — I seemed to meet dozens of people, chatting and exchanging travel plans in Spanish to Italians and in English to Slovenians. One evening a strange discussion of European history emerged between two Dutch, a German, two Slovenians, an American and another English and myself. Unfortunately, the conversation moved to the Dutch Wars of Independence, something I know a reasonable amount on, and especially after the other English guy started repeating banal historical commonplaces, I felt compelled to "enlighten" everyone with my understanding of events: "The key was, I think, the financial ability of Phillip II's commanders to wage war in the Netherlands, and there were three phases to this: up to 1580, then up to 1588, then afterwards..." The Dutch seemed interested enough in my rantings, luckily, but I felt a bit of a prat the next morning.
But where was Daniel Day Lewis?
Mexico City's reputation for blinding pollution and epidemic crime had left me expecting something among the lines of the last scene of Gangs of New York: men with moustaches running out of fog filled streets and slashing me with knives. But when I was there, the pollution was not that noticeable, and I didn't have a problem with crime at all. However, the threat of violence did seem perpetually nearby. It got a little wearying that our hostel had an armed and armoured guard in reception each night, that Frida's house had two pistoled police officiers slouching outside, that the hostel supplied a list of ten bars, and warned us we might be slipped drugs if we bought drinks in other places. No one referred to it, but I noticed everyone retreated to the hostel's bar once it got dark, talking until we got tired.
On to Puebla and Oaxaca
Everyone I spoke to at Moneda seemed to be heading to the city of Oaxaca, so I felt I needed a breather from backpackerness before the next few weeks in Oaxaca, San Christobal de las Casas and Antigua. I went to the nearby city of Puebla, planning to stay a couple of days. Puebla is a pleasant city, with a vibrant main boulevard, friendly people and a truly awesome cathedral, but I couldn't find anywhere good to stay. I ended up in Hotel Cathedral, which had a toilet that lacked a seat and didn't flush, a shower that stank, and bedroom walls that only extended three quarters of the way to the ceiling, so sounds of televisions soared to me until the early morning. I wouldn't have minded any of this, but the room cost 100 pesos, which I considered the upper limit of what I am now prepared to pay per night, and the three quarter length walls were giving me flashbacks to primary school where the bullies would climb the walls of the toilet cubicles and shout at me while I was sitting on the loo. Additionally, I was feeling the call of Guatemala powerfully: each time I thought something like, "I should visit a market here", a voice spoke up, "but what are the markets like in Guatemala?" I got an email from a Canadian friend who had arrived in Oaxaca and was paying 50 pesos a night for a dorm bed, and so I caught the bus south the next day.
The bus headed south, changing altitude so much my ears were aching, past first fields and farms, then through arid hills reminisent of Baja, through two sudden thunderstorms, then up into lightly forested highlands. I'm now in the city of Oaxaca, which I am really liking, relaxing with some nice people, practicing my Spanish and just started evening salsa classes (not easy). Had my first very disorientating day volunteering in a centre for Oaxacan street children, plan to start teaching English to any of them who are interested tomorrow, no idea how that will pan out. Overall, quietly deliriously happy at the moment.
Questions? If you want more information about this area you can email the author or check out our North America Insiders page.
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