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Published: January 27th 2010
Parque Mexico
The one with all the dogs!Sarah- Our long awaited first proper blog! We have been very very busy but having a fantastic time in Mexico City. We´ve had to stay for at least a week due to our diarrhea trial (hereafter referred to as Trek Study!) but that week is not enough!
We landed at 7ish in the evening and were met by Trek Study people who helped us battle with a cash machine in the airport, after about 20 attempts and 3 cards we eventually got some money out, not a good start!! Thank you to those who gave us Pesos as gifts before we went, they could have saved us had we been unsuccessful with the evil machine!
We got to our hostel and were pretty much out for the count - end of day 1!
Day 2: Jet lag was well and truely kicking in as we both woke up at various stages through the morning (I hadn´t adapted as well as I did in Singapore unfortunately) but eventually it got to a reasonable waking up time and we had lovely Huevos a la Mexicana (scrambled eggs with chillis and tomato) at the hostel with a nice cup of herbal tea😊
Big Flag
Some will recognise this from a certain video.. Especially nice as it was our first food since the plane!
We had an appointment with the Trek people in the morning where we gave some blood and attempted to speak Spanish with our two doctors, one we nicknamed Mexican Michael J Fox due to his uncanny similarity to the aforementioned actor when playing a doctor in Scrubs! Mr Fox also informed us we had better take some Spanish lessons "sooner rather than later". Cheeky so and so!
We were feeling a bit woozy for the rest of the day, probably a combination of tiredness, jetlag, the altitude (Mexico City is 2240m/7349ft above sea level) and the fact we had just given rather a lot of blood away, so we took it easy. We went for a walk around the neighbourhood we were staying in, which is called Colonia Roma and is a lovely part of the city with lots of old colonial buildings. It´s also, as we have been told by many people here, one of the safest parts of the city. We wondered into an area known as Colonia Condesa, which is a beautiful, very rich part of the city - distinguishable from Roma by the big
Cathedral
Proper good shot eh? scary looking gates surrounding the houses, and some rather posh cars! We walked through some nice shady parks, one of which was full of dogs of every shape and size charging around, which was rather surreal, more dogs than people!
In the evening we headed out for something to eat but were so hungry and the city was so big and scary (which seems strange now we know our way around!) go we stopped at a Torta stand where we had a lovely sandwich each. The appearance of some avacado in the sandwiches eased our concerns about the cleanliness of the place.. like for some reason only clean people eat avacado?! We had planned to meet our friend Karen´s cousin Erik in the evening but he couldn´t make it as he had a bit of a disaster with his wallet being stolen - looking back it´s just as well we didn´t meet up that evening as we were struggling to stay awake at 9pm!!
Day Three and I woke up feeling hungover, this happened to me for the first 3 or 4 days, even when I hadn´t had a drop of alcohol!
Ben- righto, it´s kind
Diego Rivera Mural
in the Royal Palace of hard to remember what we did actually. Ok. I believe on our second day we went into the centre of the city (The Centro Historico). It is an UNESCO world heritage site, and emerging from the subway to see the buildings was quite an incredible experience. There are so many really fantastic and elaborate buildings built since 1520 ish (i think?) by the Spanish colonists. I don´t know a lot about architecture, so cannot properly describe them, but we´ll put up some pictures which are worth 12 words or something like that. (on the way there i got stuck three times in the subway train door - Sarah did her usual trick of changing her mind about which carriage to enter at the last moment and the doors shut behind her (this has happened many times in London and once in Singapore) so i thought ´not this time´and stuck my arms between the doors. I managed to pull them apart and step through, but then the doors shut on my torso. I struggled to pull them apart once more as the train revved up to go, inched through and then the doors shut on my ankle of my left
Another sinking building!
Silly billies made it from marble=very heavy. View from the Seers building foot. I thought then that I would have to endure the whole journey this way but a kind Mexican chap stepped up the pull the doors apart once more and i could pull my leg through).
In the city we visited the Presidential palace which was a beautiful building with lots of fascinating Diego Rivera murals depicting Mexican history, pre and post conquest. We then visited the Cathedral, which is without doubt the most elaborate, grand, and possibly largest in size i have ever seen. We then wandered around enjoying the architecture, the sounds of the organ grinders (a tradition brought over by Italian immigrants apparently) and the general ambience in and around the Zocalo (with the huge Mexican flag fluttering above us). We ate at a Vegetarian restaurant - Enchiladas and Tacos - while an old man played lounge jazz on an old organ in the restaurant. Then at 4 we went to meet Sarah´s friend Karen´s cousin Erik, who lives in Mexico City.
We then had a really lovely afternoon and evening with Erik. He took us places that we probably would never have thought to go, such as a student art gallery with a cafe
In the Cantina
Bens first Michelada! on the top floor with great views, the Sears shopping centre tower, that again had a cafe up at the top with incredible views (over the other side of town). A Cantina (a Mexican bar - it had swing doors!) where we drank this lovely dark beer and then a kind-of ´beer cocktail´- mine being this dark beer with salt around the rim of the glass and lime juice mixed in. Erik had a ´Cubana´which had five types of chilli in, plus Worcestershire sauce and salt around the rim also. Sarah stuck with the plain beer (which was really nice!). We were waited on by smartly dressed men, which was rather strange considering that it wasn´t the most upmarket of places, and at one point we were brought popcorn and chilli sauce as tapas. We were then treated to some live music. Leaving the cantina we walked down the main road that runs from the old castle in Chapultepec park to the presidential palace, taking in the night-time sites as we went. We concluded the evening by sitting at the base of the angel of independence - a gold angel on a tall column in the middle of a roundabout
Chapultapec Park
Right behind us, a man just wearing pants and a vest was being evicted! monument - watching the traffic and talking. A jolly good time was had by all.
Sarah-
Day 4 : Today we visited Bosque de Chapultapec (or Chapultepec Park to give it it´s anglicised name) It´s a huge expanse of parkland with lots of museums, two lakes and even a zoo! We watched a military band play drums and trumpets then went to the Museo de Arte Moderno to have a bit of a wander. We´d gone specifically to see Frida Kahlo´s famous painting "Las dos Fridas" which was super fantastic.
We had to get back to our hostel to pick up our bags as today was the day we moved into our posh hotel! However we were both very hungry so we took a chance and went to a tiny restaurant we chose at random. It turned out to be really, nice, even if we were completely confused about what was going on the whole time! We drank our body weight in Tamarind water and Ben had some suspiciously chickeney soup. But we did have a lovely meal, I had a really nice chicken dish from Puebla, a city outside Mexico City that is in fact our
next stop.
We moved to our posh hotel and it was BRILLIANT! For those who I haven´t already told, my colleagues at work bought us 3 nights in a 5* hotel in Mexico City, and today was our first day. We had a bit of an explore and a swim in the pool on the roof, we also managed to somehow get ourselves into a part of the hotel I don´t think we were meant to be in! Ben was very happy because we were never more than 3 paces from a coffee machine at any time. After our explore we went to the Angel of Independence, which we could see from our room window, and watched the sunset. The amount of snogging couples that joined us made me feel a little sick!! We then went to a coffee shop we had spotted earlier that sold white hot chocolate, something that I will search out whatever country I visit - YUM! Ben had an apple and pineapple empanada which was also rather tasty.
We topped off our day at the hotel with crisps for dinner watching a random American cop show on the TV, the only thing we
could find that wasn´t dubbed in Spanish - we don´t know enough Spanish yet!!
Next installment will be coming very soon😊
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Vincent
non-member comment
nah..
no way.. pictures, please.