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Published: April 28th 2008
Good day loyal fans of mine, fear not, here comes the latest thrilling installment in the tales of Lizzie´s Mexican Adventure (on a computer that understands apostrophies!!) Wow-wah-woo-wah!
Firstly, boring camp stuff...actually not so boring! We have graduated from Matias´school of raking, after whinging to James when he came about how boring it is, and have now been promoted to...PAINTING! So we´ve spent the last month´s Wednesdays painting over the old peachy pink in...more peachy pink! Still not quite finished and I´m scared of the tall ladders, actually I´m scared of the small ladders, I don´t really want Mexico to be my country of death, so I´m leaving that up to Becky.
A bit more exciting but still on the painting front, the Doc decreed last Thursday that the Becarios were to rake the area between the comedor and the juegos and paint the trees, so everyone changed into shorts and sandals and the work party commenced! It was hilarious...I´ve never seen anyone paint trees quite like that! The boys were just slapping it on willy nilly and ended up more covered in paint themselves than the trees were. After about half an hours raking Adrian made me swap
Camoh Work Party
Wheelbarrow Crewmy chosen weapon with one of the girls (who wasn´t impressed) so I snuck off to get my camera to document the anarchy, just imagiene 50 seven to fourteen year olds armed with paint brushes and vats of paint (interestingly mixed with water from a powder!) and told to paint trees if you will! And only one boy got paint in his eye, a veritable success. Once I was handed a paintbrush and entrusted with trees to paint I began to better understand the unusual slapping on the paint technique was in fact necessary to get any of the white water that passed as paint onto the trees, rather than bypassing the tree altogether and instead firing it at my legs and all those around me. I still got covered. Lucky I now have gardening and farm shorts!
Last weekend we worked a troop of Polynesian dancers came from the GUAY in Mexico. They were having a kind of ceelbration weekend with a big show on Saturday night to showcase their bum shaking and hip wiggling. This would have been fine with me except for the fact that the majority of the dancers were between the ages of about
5 and 15. Surely this is wrong!! What kind of parent would send their daughter to learn to dance like that!??! I just don´t understand it! I tried to explain this to one of the consajeros, but he didn´t get it, he seemed to think it was fine. Unfortunately Wikipedia has let me down on knowledge of Polynesian Dancing so I don´t know for a fact that it´s some kind of fertility dance, but with a complete lack of information I´m going to go ahead and say it surely looks like one to me! Or moderate lap dancing...
So anyway, here I´m going to talk about the weather! It´s got wierd. It´s still hot and sunny in the mornings but in the afternoons it clouds over and gets all oppressive, one day last week it was like the end of the world was coming! In the nights there are thunderstorms but far far away, so we can just see the lightening and hear the thunder but there´s little or no rain to be seen. On Thursday night there was a storm a lot closer and it set the hill above the camp on fire. Very excited we set off
in our pyjamas to find the best view point and then report to Jorge and Urbano, who weren´t impressed, apparently it happens all the time! In the morning we saw the helicopter putting it out with a large bucket of water slung underneath it.
The helicpoter sighting was on the way to Santa Domingo, the school we teach at on a Friday, all the way I was hoping there would be no classes so we could escape to Mexico faster and lo and behold! There was a book festival and they were doing a play and readings and things for the mamas, so we stayed to watch our classes do a play called "The wings of the night" dressed as bats and parrots. The play was about parrots and bats wanting to be friends and play together but they couldn´t because they sleep at different times. Lovely! The costumes were fantastic!
After the second run of the play we set off for Mexico, found the hotel specified by Ed, and checked out our cell - sin baño. I suppose for $60 a night you can´t complain! That´s just 3 of your English pounds. I have decided on reflection
THE Biggest Tower
Closed to the public I quite like the centre of Mexico, it has some very beautiful colonial buildings, it´s quite compact and has to many things to do its unbelievable. We spent most of Friday just aquainting ourselves with the area and jeans shopping, an unsuccessful venture. Ed arrived at about 10 and we went for tacos. Yum yum.
On Saturday morning following Ed and Becky´s decision to have a lie in I got up early and escaped the dastardly one (oo she wasn´t pleased...more on this later) and went for a wander. At 8am in Mexico City NOTHING is open, so I decided to check out a photography exhibition in the zocalo called Ashes and Snow, it´s by a Columbian photographer (I think) and is housed in a huge ´nomadic museum´which has travelled to LA and Tokyo before heading to Mexico. The photographs are all absolutely stunning, images of wild animals, tigers, elephants and whales in beautiful locations with tribal people, I suppose from Columbia! The atmosphere in there was really nice and calm, not what I expected! I came out feeling thoroughly chilled out. But for one mishap. For the Mexico leg of the tour they have added water to the
edges of the platform along which you walk to see the photos, the water is to symbolise the canals that used to be in the zocalo before it was urbanised by the Spanish and became how it is today. It was really quite busy even at 8am and I decided the best plan was to sneak up the sides of the pathway, thinking that the water was polished metal or something, I stepped around a person and quickly discovered the water was in fact quite wet. Luckily not too deep! Embarassed and with a wet foot I scuttled off and all was well!
I went back to the hotel to meet Ed and Becky, we went for breakfast at a bread shop and then to the Palacio National, again in the zocalo, to see the Diego Riviera murals. I think there are about 10 or 12 altogether, one huge one on the main staircase and several smaller ones. They´re all images of different points in Mexican history from the Aztecs and Mayas to the invasion by the Spanish and the Revolution. The pictures are just fantastic, I just don´t know how he knew where to start, or how to
start describing them! In a way they´re like a Wasgij, so incredibly detailed and colourful with so much going on that at first you don´t see until you take a closer look! You could spend weeks studying them. But we had an itinerary so off we went!
I wanted to go up the Torre LatinoAmericano, once the largest building in Latin America but Ed had read in the Lonely Planet about the current tallest building in the world in Latin America by the Bosque de Chautapec so we went by metro to the Torre Mayor, went to the toilet there and were sadly informed it has been closed to the public for 2 years now. Dam. Our hopes and dreams dashed we went to the Anthropology Museum a little ahead of it´s appointed time. I have to admit I was rubbish, I don´t think I´m a very good museum goer, I can´t be bothered to read the information if there´s a lot, so I wandered around taking photos of anything pretty or interesting. Apparently the Sun Stone´s quite interesting but I don´t really know a lot about it to tell you...but it was pretty so I have a photo,
what luck!
Having been seperated from my pack in the museum I went shopping, whoops, but met them again in the zocalo. We briefly also met Kerry, but she swiftly disappeared to meet a friend, not to be seen again until 2pm the following day, there was a party, and a concert, and an after party...! Not to be discouraged from our dreams of being high high in the sky we settled for the Torre LatinoAmericano, the 5th tallest in Mexico. Despite that points in its favour were proximity to our hotel and it being the tallest building to survive an earthquake (the one in 1985). The view from the top was AMAZING! In terms of buildings and landmarks it´s not nearly as impressive as London or Paris but the sheer extent of the city is mindblowing. Also, the city is in a valley surrounded by hills, I knew that from reading about it, but I hadn´t actually SEEN it until then. The mountains are the perfect backdrop for such a sprawling ugly city. Unfortunately Becky picked her moment to kick off about me going out alone that morning. I wasn´t impressed. "It was obvious you wanted to be
on your own, why didn´t you just wait for me, I´d have only been 10 mins" (Imagine in a scouse whine for full effect) Well, as you say if it was obvious I wanted to be on my own and in fact away from you haven´t you just answered your question!
I took the opportunity to calm down for a while and had a look around the Alemada (or something like that!) park and checked out the hotel where I´ll be staying with my parents, not paying $60 a night gets you quite posh digs! Though I couldn´t locate the toilets! Haha! She who shall not be named apparently punched the lift wall in an adolescent boy style in a fit of anger which frightened Ed and when recounted greatly amused me. Who does that?!
So anyway, once I´d recovered being berated for wanting an hour every now and again in my own company we attempted to go to the cinema in China Town but there weren´t any films we really wanted to see so we went to the Spanish Cultural Centre behind the Cathedral instead. It was a really cool place, the downstairs is a kind of
art gallery but really modern and upstairs there´s a bar which is really popular amongst slightly extrovert people playing electro-music. I ignored the yawns and whines about it being smokey but we still left early to get a good nights sleep in preperation for rising at 5:30 to be at the Terminal de Norte for the first bus to Teothiucan at 7am.
The pyramids are absolutely HUGE! I´m not really sure what I expected, or if I infact expected anything but its incredible to think they were constructed in 100AD without the wheel or any animal power. The Pramid to the Sun, the third tallest in the world after one in Egypt and Choluca in Mexico (but that one´s still a hill so in my head doesn´t count!), we climbed right to the top. There´s been some recent discovery that it´s actually more probably a pyramid for worship of water, but I prefer the Sun and Moon. The pyramid of the moon was closed above the first terrace for some reason so we stopped there and had a good long look from above! It suddenly became obvious that the "hills" behind some of the smaller pyramids were in fact
Lizzie and Ed
Bigger than a pyramid pyramids too, just not yet uncovered, which really made me realise the extent of the civilisation there.
All pyramided out, and it was beginning to get HOT, we went back to the city and finally reencounted Kerry. We decided to check out the Mexican China Town just a couple of blocks away for lunch. At this point Becky decided to come back to Tepoztlan because she had "important things to do" so we bid her farewell. The chinese was really quite good! Much better than the Guadalajara buffet anyway!
After the meal I still had about 4 hours before I needed to come back to get here before 10 so we went to the Palacio Bellas Artes, Ed and I were skulking around waiting for Kerry in the toilet when a woman came up to us and asked if we wanted 2 free tickets to go to the opera...well yeah! I´d never been to the opera before and was quite keen to check it out, especially for free! It turned out all the tickets were free but I´m not going to let that upset me! It was quite interesting and really beautiful, although it being a German language opera, set in Spain, viewed in Mexico and translated into Spanish subtitles we didn´t really follow the story very well!
With a chocolate cornflake bun, sax music on the metro and a brief panic I´d got on the wrong bus when I didn´t see any signs for Tepoztlan until the last minute there ends my Mexican City adventure for now.
This morning I attempted to talk to Becky to explain I wasn´t being purposefully rude when I wanted to be on my own, but she just doesn´t get it! She got all offended and was her usual negativo self which is really quite depressing! I got upset and went to talk to Afredo about it all which made me feel a whole lot better! I´ve realised it´s not just me who sees the reason she is like she is, her lack of confidance and instability, which is good, I had begun to think it was just me being antisocial! Also, he´s going to sneak me (and her if she wants) out to the cinema and for a meal in Cuernavaca one night which is cool...and then we went for sopes (not soupa...confusing) with Urbano. I have a new official favorite Mexican food! It´s like a thick tortilla with salsa and chese and cream...yummy! I had 2...and a quesadilla! All before 11am!
Tomorrow the story continues, I´m going to go to Oaxaca for the week because there are so many holidays around now, dia del trabajo, dia de something else and the commeration of the battle of Puebla, conveniently clustered around a weekend with the dia del niños tagged on the end. Fantastic!
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