Mexico City - Cheap and Loud

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After an uneventful airplane trip we arrived at what turned out to be the new Terminal 2 in Mexico City. The terminal is so new that it does not have a couple of things such as a place to exchange money or almost any stores. It is very nice and shiny though. Next stop: get our pre-paid tickets from a counter to take a taxi into town, which is something they do so that the taxistas do not rob the tourists. But again we were thwarted. Because of something weird going on in town that day the taxi rides from the airport to the center were free! What a nice way to arrive to a city. Getting a taxi ride was nice because it gave us a chance to acclimate a bit and geta feel for the city. In one word - loud. It seems that every store has music blaring out of it, add to that the cars that drive around with speakers on top as well as bunches of people on the street and you will start to imagine the noise level. It is definitely very energetic here.


Having settled into our hostel we took a walk around and went to find some dinner. We wound up at Cafe Popular which is recommended by our book. In fact there are two of them, right next to each other. I guess the first one was so popular that they needed to open a second one. The food was very good and the service was quick, which you would not think by the line outside. But that turned out to be more due to its name and quality than how long it took them to serve us. And it had excellent bread, so I was very happy.

On the way back from the restaurant we saw a group of what looked like native people doing a traditional dance. They had pretty costumes on and some of them had all these shells on their boots and the shells made a noise when the dancers moved. We also saw what looked like 100 policemen having dinner out of plastic boxes right in front of our hostel window. There are in general quite a few policemen around, mostly directing traffic. It seems that instead of putting in traffic lights they would rather post a person there to do that job. Curious. We think the large amounts of police might have something to do with what is supposed to happen in the Zocalo tomorrow. We have yet to figure out what that is supposed to be, but it has something to do with the man who was not elected president in the last election, Manuel Lopez Obrador.

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